Amazon Slashes Grocery Prices By 30% & People Wonder If 'Inflation' Is A Scam (Spoiler Alert: It Is)
Is inflation a real economic phenomenon, or just another form of corporate greed?
STEKLO / Shutterstock In this day and age, one thing we definitely aren’t used to seeing is grocery prices go down. However, Amazon Fresh is the latest in a list of grocery stores to lower prices, and it has people questioning the reality of inflation.
Amazon’s grocery store, Amazon Fresh, recently lowered its grocery prices significantly.
Shockingly, Amazon is not the only retail powerhouse to do so — Walmart and Target have already lowered their prices.
“Walmart said it rolled back prices on nearly 7,000 items in its stores,” Seafood Source reported. Meanwhile, “Target also recently announced that it will lower prices on around 5,000 frequently shopped items across its stores."
As these two staples of the grocery industry race to lower their prices and garner more customers, Amazon decided to do the same.
“Amazon is slashing grocery prices by up to 30% in hopes of luring inflation-weary customers,” the New York Post said. “The company said that it will reduce prices of 4,000 items at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores online as well as at its handful of brick-and-mortar locations.”
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The worldwide vice president of Amazon Fresh, Claire Peters, stated, “Increasing our weekly deals across thousands of items and expanding the reach of Prime Savings at Amazon Fresh is just one way that we’re continuing to invest in competitive pricing and savings for all of our customers.”
As three of the world’s largest retailers cut their prices, customers are wondering how real inflation actually is.
If Amazon, Target, and Walmart can all decrease their prices simply because they chose to do so, then what does that say about inflation?
Many people feel that inflation is not real at all, but is rather a product of something known as “greedflation” or price-gouging. Companies raise their prices far beyond increased costs in order to make a higher profit.
And experts agree — corporate greed is the real source of “inflation.”
According to a report compiled by Groundwork Collaborative and reported on by The Guardian, “'resounding evidence' shows that high corporate profits are a main driver of ongoing inflation." The report found that "corporate profits accounted for about 53% of inflation during last year’s second and third quarters."
If inflation were a real thing, then companies would not be able to afford to cut prices on so many items to bring in more customers. They would be forced to keep products at the same price to make up for what they are losing to inflation.
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But that’s not the case. Instead, retailers are lowering prices with the hope of attracting more customers. The general consensus is that if they have enough money to lower prices, inflation cannot possibly be real.
It does seem suspicious that these stores are able to lower their prices while inflation is supposedly still high. And greedflation, a new form of corporate greed, sounds sadly predictable in a world where money is the bottom line.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer for YourTango who covers entertainment, news and human interest topics.