> Food producers including Kraft Heinz realized their own profit surges. The war in Ukraine rocked global grain supplies and fertilizer prices, significantly increasing the cost of food, which remains sticky.

Funny, in both cases external causes made the global prices go up, so specific companies used the opportunity to increase their prices because there was less competition on the market.

actual article:

>A joint study by think tanks IPPR and Common Wealth found profiteering by some of the world’s biggest companies forced prices up significantly higher than costs during 2022.

>[...]

>While this obviously contributed to rising prices, the report finds that company profits increased at a much faster rate than costs did, in a process often dubbed “greedflation.”

Where's the "lying"?

I don’t break out my household expenses when I negotiate pay at a new employer.

You, being a free market enthusiast, decide to test how much the market will bear, and raise your prices across the board.

Your customers, who are also your neighbors and friends, respond by socially ostracizing you.

This doesn’t exist at scale, because the people responsible for the unnecessary price hikes live far away from their customers, and do not intend to ever meet them, much less explain themselves.

People should price products to make a fair profit, one where both parties are satisfied. I don’t begrudge a car salesperson for selling me a car at above their cost, but I do if it’s wildly marked up.

Of course, if I am selling services or goods with lots of repeat business, it might behoove me to not piss off the customers and hence incentivize me to keep my price lower (which is still optimizing for the most money I think I can get, just over the long term rather than short term). If I am selling land or a business, then I am maximizing for that specific transaction, even if my profit margin is 100,000%.

When you get a job offer, and you respond back with a request for an additional $20k per year or whatever, that is doing the same thing.

> make a fair profit

What is fair is an opinion. For people living in huts, a 1,000 sq ft Soviet style apartment bloc with plumbing is unfair. And for people living in Soviet style apartment blocs, a modern 5 over 1 apartment building is unfair. And then you might find a detached single family home unfair. And then you might find a 3k sq ft home unfair.

And so on and so forth.

I think they were more stating that consolidation, which often results in a reduction in redundancies in the system, made the supply chain issues worse than they otherwise would have been. Consolidation can increase the instances of single points of failure.

For a smaller scale example: in 2016 flooding took a biscuit factory out of action for a time, and suddenly you couldn't get bourbon biscuits (and a few other varieties) anywhere. It turns out that all the UK supermarkets (except Sainsbury IIRC) and some big-name brands were supplied by that one factory¹, so they all had a stoppage of supply at the same time, and those being supplied from elsewhere were out of stock too because the remaining smaller supplies could not ramp up production to meet the new demand². The consolidation that brings more efficiency when all is well can make things worse when something goes wrong.

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[1] This also lead to “I told you so” comments from some of us, to people who were suddenly asking “if the ones I buy come from the same place, exactly the same production line, why have I been paying 25p/pack more for them?”.

[2] And even if they could, it would have been a bad business decision because once that big factory was back online the market wouldn't bare the new excess of supply meaning prices would drop, potentially below cost where margins are tight.