[kermatt]

> While commodities such as corn, wheat, coffee beans and chicken have gotten cheaper, prices for sugar, beef and french fries are still high or rising.

Are french fries a commodity?

For non-economists to try and understand the actual differences between rising supply costs vs. profit seeking (or "growth" by simply raising prices), weird metric mixing makes it harder.

[mrguyorama]

It gets way easier if you look at just a few things: Compare the price of a bag of potatoes, a store brand bag of potato chips, and a bag of Lays. The bag of Lays has doubled in price in a year, the store brand has only gone up about 30 cents. They literally come from the same factory most of the time, so if rising labor or process input costs were to blame, the generic chips would see the same price increase, as stores do not sell generic items at a loss. Instead, we see the name brand has increased a magnitude more than the generic brand. This is only explainable as greed.

The grocery price increases have been significantly targeted. The more processed a food, the more its price has increased, despite the raw ingredients not getting that much more expensive. It's also funny they say prices of beef is rising, as it's still $8 a pound for a Ribeye steak at my local supermarket.

Pepsico has absolutely gone bonkers with greed. Flavored water has doubled in price, and I promise you none of the ingredients or mostly automated production line from 1975 got more expensive suddenly.