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Is Amazon Lowering The Global Rate of Inflation? (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider:
Another investment bank analyst has signed on to the idea that the internet is holding down the rate of inflation. Bilal Hafeez, the global head of G10 FX strategy and head of EMEA research at Nomura, published two notes last month on whether the value of the dollar was being held down by Amazon and its ilk. In one note he called it "the Amazonization of inflation"... [O]nline commerce typified by Amazon is making the supply and distribution of goods so cheap that "Amazonisation" itself is now a deflationary force at a macro level, Hafeez argues. He writes: "While globalisation was the meme of the 2000s, this decade's has to be the 'Amazonisation' of commerce. Given the bulk of the cost of goods is distribution costs, Amazon's unique distribution model and widening range of products could impart a new disinflationary impulse on goods prices."
This idea is becoming more popular among analysts as the months roll by. Back in September 2016, we told you about the "Spotify problem," in an interview with HSBC's James Pomeroy. His theory is that the internet allows consumers to shop around and compare prices incredibly easily. It also substitutes cheap digital goods over more expensive physical ones. For instance, people stop paying £20 every month for a CD when they start paying £10 a month for endless music from Spotify. The result is that businesses are aggressively driving down their own prices because consumers simply won't go to the ones that charge more, and are no longer trapped into shopping in their own neighbourhoods. Sweden is so advanced as a digital economy that it may be importing its own deflation via digital shopping, Pomeroy argued.
This idea is becoming more popular among analysts as the months roll by. Back in September 2016, we told you about the "Spotify problem," in an interview with HSBC's James Pomeroy. His theory is that the internet allows consumers to shop around and compare prices incredibly easily. It also substitutes cheap digital goods over more expensive physical ones. For instance, people stop paying £20 every month for a CD when they start paying £10 a month for endless music from Spotify. The result is that businesses are aggressively driving down their own prices because consumers simply won't go to the ones that charge more, and are no longer trapped into shopping in their own neighbourhoods. Sweden is so advanced as a digital economy that it may be importing its own deflation via digital shopping, Pomeroy argued.
It's not really reduced inflation as much as it is removal of the parasitic layers between seller and end user.
Science and technology are lowering it. We are slowly going to have to face the fact that our economic and social models are obsolete. We will have to accept that not everyone needs to work and we are in an ocean of abundance, but forcing each other to operate as if it's the Bronze Age.
As usual, it's not the countless scientists and engineers that designed and built the machinery that allows this abundance, instead, we focus on one person who had nothing to do with it, and he gets all the credit.
* Transit fares have gone up continuously; e.g. https://globalnews.ca/news/235... And pennies have been withdrawn from circulation in Canada
*A new 1974 Ford Maverick, V8, automatic transmission cost under $4,000 in Canada, and probably around $3,000 US. Try getting a 2018 Ford Focus for under $20,000 today.
* Food prices have kept rising continuously
* Rents and housing getting unaffordable here in Toronto
* Cable bills keep shooting upwards, which is why "cord-cutting" is now a thing
* A new 50 inch plasma TV was $3,500 in 2007 dollars. Today a 50 inch LED TV can be had for $300
* A basic IBM PC with 640 KILObytes of ram, 10 MEGAbyte disk drive, and 320x200 siaplay CRT came in at around $5,000 in 1983 dollars. Today's $1,000 machines walk all over it.
Problem... you can't live in a PC or TV; you can't eat a PC or TV; you can't ride to work in a PC or TV. The upper or upper-middle class are better off today (what's left of the middle class, but that's another story).
Meanwhile. a lot of ordinary people, especially those in minimum wage jobs, have extreme difficulty paying for basic necessities. Is there an inflation index for necessities, i.e. food/shelter/clothing and transportation? And by transportation, I mean local stuff. A flight to Hawaii might cost less today, but the average person is more worried about commuting to work, and getting around town.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
1. Return on savings accounts: Abysmally low.
2. Have you seen a decent raise since the 80's? Not me... Not anyone I know. All decent raises happen at the C-level and above.
3. Have you noticed the price of housing, education and heath care are all skyrocketing? These are the essential things everyone needs. Will food be next?
4. What about that trend towards precarious employment (temps, gig work, etc.) have you been affected? Jobs are essential too.
5. All the stuff not required to live decently has not been inflating... (Well maybe except for cable TV, airline fares, and insurance).
6. Have you noticed the hyperbole in politics? This is a distraction to keep everyone from noticing the detrimental changes to society.
7. Have you noticed the government can't get anything done? Me too.
8. Have you noticed a trend to marginalize the rights of ordinary citizens? (Binding Arbitration, Non-compete agreements, Federal preemption)
9. Have you noticed a rise in hate groups, and religious zealotry, as well as attacks gay and transgender people? Hmmmm, this is like Germany in the 1930's.
Something nasty is bound to happen soon.
I save time by cooking at home. If I were to eat out every meal, I'd be wasting a ton of time fighting through traffic and waiting in lines, three times a day. I'd also be getting sick because those restaurants are never perfect at hygiene. I've never had food poisoning from a meal I prepared at home, but when I eat out, it's a bit like rolling dice.
With a garden in my backyard, a lot of my food doesn't even need to be cooked -- cooking is a crutch for people eating tough store bought foods that aren't young, fresh, and tender like what I get out of my garden. Plus, I don't have to wait in any lines to "check out" from my garden "grocery store."
Next, I learned about composting my food wastes, which REALLY improves the cleanup efforts of stuff that used to take forever to cleanup manually. It is SO much easier to take my dirty cutting board outside and hose it off at high pressure over the woodchip compost pile than scrubbing it indoors where anything splashing ends up creating potential cross-contamination and more cleanup work.
1. Walmart isn't always the cheapest.
2. There are things that Walmart just plain doesn't sell. At least, not at their retail stores.
If you're buying something like an XBox One bundle, the console you'll get at Walmart is no different from the console you'll get from anyone else, so there's no reason to favor or avoid Walmart if you're buying one.
If you want a Denon or Yamaha home theater amp, you aren't going to be getting it from your local Walmart store AT ANY PRICE, because Walmart doesn't stock expensive niche items in retail stores at all, and is rarely price-competitive with Amazon when they have them online.
Likewise, the products sold at Walmart aren't necessarily identical in quality to seemingly-identical products sold elsewhere. For example, a TV manufacturer might have a model -- let's call it the "QZX65Y" -- that everyone at avsforum.com worships, and has 99% 5-star reviews everywhere from people who think it's the greatest TV, ever. That TV might wholesale for $520, and sell for $599 at stores like Best Buy. Now, let's scrutinize its seemingly-identical cousin, the "QZX65Y3" (sold only by Walmart). See, Walmart balked at the $520 wholesale price, and threatened to walk unless the manufacturer sold it to them for $507. But Walmart doesn't really care if their model is literally 100% identical, as long as it has the same advertised specs. So, the manufacturer grudgingly agrees to Walmart's lower wholesale price, then manufactures Walmart's run of TVs using cheaper, lower-binned backlight LEDs, and gives it a slightly different model number to avoid harming all the 5-star reviews the "real" model has gotten. Then Walmart advertises it for $589. On paper, the two look the same -- especially to a clueless consumer who doesn't even know what to look for. But if you put the two models side by side displaying uniform 50% gray, the "good" model might display a field of relatively consistent gray, while the "Walmart" model might have patches with a blue or yellow twinge, or slightly different brightness (because low-binned LEDs aren't guaranteed to be as consistent as high-binned LEDs).
Sadly, the same kind of "quality fade" can happen if, a year later, you go to some regional electronics chain (like Brandsmart in Florida) who sells mostly "last year's models, at rock-bottom prices". For the last manufacturing run or two of a given model, the manufacturer might just switch to low-binned LEDs so they can reduce the wholesale price and scrape up a few more buyers. The "good" stores won't buy the cost-reduced models anyway (they're waiting for next year's models), and by that point the manufacturer has piled up enough 5-star reviews for ANYONE who bitches about getting a late-version model with inferior low-binned LEDs to look like a wacky outlier. Companies like Linksys and Netgear do this so often, they've practically turned quality-fade into a performance art.
It happens. All the time. Every single manufacturer with models specific to Walmart does this. And it's not just TVs... a Lawn Boy or Toro lawnmower from Walmart might LOOK like the lawnmowers sold by more expensive stores, but if you scrutinize the model numbers, you'll see that they differ slightly. And if you tore down two seemingly-identical models (with slightly different model numbers) side by side, you'll find at least a few insidious differences, GUARANTEED. Maybe it's something as simple as polishing off the injection-molding burrs from the starter handle on the "good" model, while leaving them on the "Walmart" model. Or using stainless-steel screws on the "good" model, and cheaper galvanized screws on the "Walmart" model. Regardless, the differences are real, and they're there if you look hard enough for them.