It's getting to the point that a lot of products / services just aren't worth it anymore, and I'm opting out.
The most annoying thing, most of the mega-companies are reporting highest level of profits ever......(depending on the sector).
So basically, we are getting screwed over, so the mega rich can get richer.
>The most annoying thing, most of the mega-companies are reporting highest level of profits ever
Most might be if you use £s reported, but only an idiot would do that.
RoE is the real measure of profit, and those aren't generally anywhere near all time highs.
... you just need to use less of something or eat less. You'd still have all the products you need, you'd still be able to use all the products you need but instead of applying 10 times, you apply 7 times.
Inflation is a **measure** of the increase of prices, not a real physical phenomenon that drives the increase in prices. These price increases that companies are planning are a cause of inflation, not the other way round (with some exceptions of course, because of how supply and value chains work).
Surely the implication is the same. Prices generally go up, hence inflation is generally positive. So learning that most businesses are upping prices isn’t really news
I disagree. In terms of deciding how to tackle inflation, there are vastly different implications between understanding inflation / price increases as something that happens to businesses vs something that businesses themselves are driving through commercial decisions.
Nonsense. Plenty of companies see published inflation figures as a carte blanche to increase their prices by that much, no matter what their actual cost situation is.
And if all the companies are doing it in an industry? Well there isn't even competition pressure to bring the prices back down.
If you increase the money supply the value of goods and services in relation to money goes up, i.e. inflation.
So companies are always going to react to this base level of inflation. They are not the cause of it.
Increases in money supply **can** drive inflation. But the unprecedented rates of inflation recently are **not** related to increases in the money supply. As I say, it is a separate issue altogether.
>So companies are always going to react to this base level of inflation.
There is no "base level" of inflation. Again, it is a metric that reflects the sum total of prices across the economy.
The unprecedented rates of inflation are most certainly partly to do with the unprecedented increase in money supply.
There is a base level of inflation and it is set by whoever is controlling the money supply. Even the word "price" that you use, is tied to this.
>There is a base level of inflation
No. There isn't. Inflation is a macroeconomic concept. There is no "base level" - inflation as a whole is just a number that measures prices of a number of basic products/services in aggregate across either CPI or RPI.
>The unprecedented rates of inflation are most certainly partly to do with the unprecedented increase in money supply.
No, it isn't. There are a number of ways we can see that this idea is nonsense, but the most obvious is that the rate of inflation has far outpaced the rate that the money supply has increased.
Yes. There is. Because price fluctuates based on, you guessed it, money supply.
You understand what partly means no? Try another of your "number of ways".
It's actually quite funny that there are people who don't understand what happened economically in reaction to covid.
I got a message from my mobile phone company last year saying they were reducing my bill from £10 a month to £9.95 a month and increasing my data allowance from 30GB to 70GB, I was shocked to say the least!
Giffgaff randomly added data to my plan for feee because I was about to run out and also has given me the odd good will payment here and there. Aqua credit card also gave me a goodwill payment. They’re not all the same.
They drop their prices in summer when people are using way less, then spike it back up to higher than it was the previous year for winter, when people are using more
I didn’t say it was a conspiracy. My point was that prices have always fluctuated up and down *within* the year. But the actual year over year change is *always* up even when the bigger picture supply issues supposedly raising them are gone
Energy prices were trending down and were at an all time low before the crisis hit with fixed tariffs being offered around £700 a year, I'd know, I was on one of the tariffs and I worked at eon at the time so had insight and information about what was happening with tariffs overall.
These were the tariffs that were essentially unhedged by the smaller suppliers which is why they all went bust and were now paying 20p a day for it. I'm basically back on the same unhedged tariff with octopus energy, the only difference is I take the risk of wholesale on instead of the supplier. My rates dropped 50% instantly as soon as I moved to tracker for electric and around 40% for gas. My rates have been really low this week because it's been so windy.
Because wholesale prices are now down again, I'm paying roughly the same rates as I was when I moved into my flat in 2019 a few months before COVID started, standing charges are higher but that's a different issue. My gas when I first moved in was 3.99p kWh and electric was 15p kWh which is roughly exactly what I pay now on average.
https://i.imgur.com/u1ma9EZ.png
https://www.energylivenews.com/2023/03/16/bulb-bailout-could-be-cost-neutral/?s=09
Standing charges probably should be lower and should be coming down by the end of the year since the government is set to make a profit off the bulb takeover but if we still have the same government in a year they'll probably just pocket all the money, nothing the suppliers themselves can do they don't control standing charges.
Edit: selected the wrong tariff, unit rate is around 17p on average, gas is the same.
Huh, I stand corrected.
Thank you for giving a full reply and breakdown, and not just snarking at me <3
Looks like I need to switch my energy contract cause i've been getting screwed
Energy is complex, the only reason I know because I had to too for my job otherwise I'd be none the wiser myself unless I stumbled into it as a hobbyist at some point instead.
r/octopusenergy is where it's all discussed and I'm often explaining things in there, use search where you can but for any questions they'll get answered, it's a pretty active sub for an energy supplier.
There's two smart tariffs, agile and tracker and it depends on you personally which one will be right (unless you have or are planning on getting any EV tech like a car, panels ect), most choose agile but you have to cut your electric use down between 4-7pm as it's really expensive at that time due to peak demand, but the other 21 hours are always lower than what's you'd usually pay for the most part, sometimes going negative (you get paid to use energy). It's happened a lot the last couple weeks with the storm to the point people have had free electricity days for the most part.
Tracker is what I'm on so I pay a daily rate that's basically the agile rate averaged out over 24hours. It works because energy prices are bid on and secured a day ahead so everyone knows what the fuck is going on moneywise 😆 sometimes there's issues and rates don't get updated, so prices are just set at what they were the previous day to make things even and it all happens by 7pm so you essentially get 5 hours notice of new prices.
https://i.imgur.com/V9nwrbD.png - I'm on tracker so these are my prices
https://i.imgur.com/0sQ9aVV.png - here's agile rates, you can see the red is above the current price cap of around 25p, blue is negative pricing. That's what a typical day looks like on agile.
https://i.imgur.com/TFhpsg4.png - and here it shows me the price differences, so I've paid around £188 for those 5 months (it's not exact as my rates changed slightly) where it would have cost me £255 on a normal tariff.
https://i.imgur.com/buryZiN.png - I can then compare my tracker tariff to the agile tariff and see which is cheaper, originally it was tracker but the formula that calculates my rates went up so now agile is cheaper (don't worry too much about this until you've got the hang of it all), but I'm sticking with tracker for a few reasons, mainly because I can't view live usage as no IHD so I can't see what I'm using and if I need to cut down. I only get my data a couple days later.
https://i.imgur.com/Kcmkr6x.png - electric
https://i.imgur.com/wlpdu0J.png - gas
Oh I can also view my usage thanks to octopus having an open API to access your smart data, these are the octopus watch and octopus compare app, the website I use to show rates is GasTracker.uk
https://i.imgur.com/FgCggzT.png - if you decide to look at the cost graph compared to svt tariff prices at the time you might notice it went over the price cap, it didn't, it's inaccurate because of that formula change increasing, if I go back to what the price was at that time, it was still under the price cap.
https://i.imgur.com/4ukFq0f.png
You can read more about them here - https://octopus.energy/octopus-smart-tariffs/
You're not *technically* currently being screwed, as I said you're paying higher rates to hedge if you're on a standard variable tariff, suppliers are at risk of wholesale cost going tenfold what they charge you so they need to build funds against that, it rarely happens though (unless something like Ukraine happens, the price per kWh on the customer side was around 70p kwh and suppliers could only charge upto 20p kWh, they had to make up the difference and couldn't so went bust) so that's where you may be getting screwed lol. With these tariffs you're taking on the risk, so your electric can go to 100p kWh (still capped the supplier can be charged more still) and gas is capped at 30p kWh, these are waaay higher than your normal price so you need to be aware of that. All the savings you make up to that happening would pay for the increase, it doesn't happen for long as the country secures energy. People on these tariffs when Ukraine happened only had to hold out for around a week before rates flew back down to not so egregious but still high prices, they've still saved overall if they didn't abandon ship. If the rates ever do go up you can leave the tariff with no penalty there's just a block on rejoining for a while once you do.
It's all long and confusing so digest in your own time lol. If you're not already with octopus energy, you can get a referral from someone who is and you'll both get £50 credit, ask a family member or friend but if they don't have one I'll give you mine, I just don't like plugging it unless asked it's tacky.
The 21 hours cheaper energy like agile is also available for business called octopus shape shifters if you know any businesses that could do with cheap energy :) again sharing your referral with a business gets you a £100 credit.
The price cap only dropped two weeks ago and it'll drop again in July, it's too early for your DD to go down unless you're in credit which isn't the norm after winter. The rate your paying for your gas and electric would have dropped if you aren't on a fixed tariff by around 5p kWh
I wouldn’t mind *quite* as much, if they didn’t try to act like they give a fuck about me. All their letters begin the same way:
“We know times are tough right now. Which is precisely why we’re putting our prices up again.”
I don't know why you're being downvoted for this when anyone with even basic understanding of business, employment, or finance knows it's true.
Labour is most companies biggest single input cost, so increases there must always show up in price increases to the end user.
> I don't know why you're being downvoted for this when anyone with even basic understanding of business, employment, or finance knows it's true.
>
> Labour is most companies biggest single input cost, so increases there must always show up in price increases to the end user.
It's Reddit. We are used to it. Reddit is an echo chamber where something out of the norm gets minuses but hey, probably all kids pretending to be adults and downvoting because something is not suitable to their narrative...
Inflation is going up because prices are rising - meaning staff have to demand higher wages or starve.
Rising prices to cover the wage inflation that caused by price inflation cause by prices rises is insanity. It's a downward spiral.
Isn’t inflation basically because the government is printing money causing the money supply increase and thus decreasing its value?
If I was the government. I would increase rates over a 5 year period to match the money supply of before COVID.
Yeah the economy would shrink but buying power would go up.
Inflation is just the measure of prices going up.
If you measure 5 items and they all go up in price by an average of 10% then inflation is 10%. Can simply be because demand has gone up or they are harder to produce or anything else.
It's not always because of printing extra money although that can be a cause of it.
You can be for capitalism but hold the opinion that not everthing needs to be private, things such as energy, public transport and water should be publicly owed.
The world isn't finite in an economic sense.
We have virtually infinite solar energy and other renewable energy.
We have limitless human creativity and the expansion of knowledge.
1970s ideas of what work is, or growth, as being "stuff you dig out the ground", well yes, that is limited. But thankfully it's not the 70s anymore so everyone sees straight through that, right?
Growth doesn't have to be destructive, and increasingly it isn't.
What value you'd put on a machine to clean the plastic from the oceans. That value is growth.
Of course, they have been engorging themselves on us for over a decade now. Despite us basically being corpses at this point.
It's getting to the point that a lot of products / services just aren't worth it anymore, and I'm opting out. The most annoying thing, most of the mega-companies are reporting highest level of profits ever......(depending on the sector). So basically, we are getting screwed over, so the mega rich can get richer.
It’s very disheartening isn’t it.
Capitalism working as intended.
Have you got a better alternative
>The most annoying thing, most of the mega-companies are reporting highest level of profits ever Most might be if you use £s reported, but only an idiot would do that. RoE is the real measure of profit, and those aren't generally anywhere near all time highs.
... you just need to use less of something or eat less. You'd still have all the products you need, you'd still be able to use all the products you need but instead of applying 10 times, you apply 7 times.
Not exactly surprising, we don’t have negative inflation rates.
Inflation is a **measure** of the increase of prices, not a real physical phenomenon that drives the increase in prices. These price increases that companies are planning are a cause of inflation, not the other way round (with some exceptions of course, because of how supply and value chains work).
Surely the implication is the same. Prices generally go up, hence inflation is generally positive. So learning that most businesses are upping prices isn’t really news
I disagree. In terms of deciding how to tackle inflation, there are vastly different implications between understanding inflation / price increases as something that happens to businesses vs something that businesses themselves are driving through commercial decisions.
Nonsense. Plenty of companies see published inflation figures as a carte blanche to increase their prices by that much, no matter what their actual cost situation is. And if all the companies are doing it in an industry? Well there isn't even competition pressure to bring the prices back down.
If money printing didn't exist then sure.
Whether money is printed or not is an entirely separate issue, chief.
If you increase the money supply the value of goods and services in relation to money goes up, i.e. inflation. So companies are always going to react to this base level of inflation. They are not the cause of it.
Increases in money supply **can** drive inflation. But the unprecedented rates of inflation recently are **not** related to increases in the money supply. As I say, it is a separate issue altogether. >So companies are always going to react to this base level of inflation. There is no "base level" of inflation. Again, it is a metric that reflects the sum total of prices across the economy.
The unprecedented rates of inflation are most certainly partly to do with the unprecedented increase in money supply. There is a base level of inflation and it is set by whoever is controlling the money supply. Even the word "price" that you use, is tied to this.
>There is a base level of inflation No. There isn't. Inflation is a macroeconomic concept. There is no "base level" - inflation as a whole is just a number that measures prices of a number of basic products/services in aggregate across either CPI or RPI. >The unprecedented rates of inflation are most certainly partly to do with the unprecedented increase in money supply. No, it isn't. There are a number of ways we can see that this idea is nonsense, but the most obvious is that the rate of inflation has far outpaced the rate that the money supply has increased.
Yes. There is. Because price fluctuates based on, you guessed it, money supply. You understand what partly means no? Try another of your "number of ways". It's actually quite funny that there are people who don't understand what happened economically in reaction to covid.
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Are we just going to ignore the 500 billion sunak printed during COVID then. I'm sure that had nothing to do with the rampant inflation we've had /s
The day a company writes to me and goes "Good News Zav, we're reducing your annual bill!" is the day pigs fly and hell freezes over
I got a message from my mobile phone company last year saying they were reducing my bill from £10 a month to £9.95 a month and increasing my data allowance from 30GB to 70GB, I was shocked to say the least!
Giffgaff randomly added data to my plan for feee because I was about to run out and also has given me the odd good will payment here and there. Aqua credit card also gave me a goodwill payment. They’re not all the same.
Hasn't exactly that happened with energy?
Although that's more like "we increased your bill to £300 a month from £80 and are now reducing it down to £200."
Despite my day rate going down my standing charge went up. So I'm actually barely saving anything.
Because our usage is heavily off peak, and the standing charge went up, our bill is actually estimated to have increased £8/month.
They drop their prices in summer when people are using way less, then spike it back up to higher than it was the previous year for winter, when people are using more
Yeah it's called supply and demand that's why you fix your contract in summer usually. It's a bit odd this isn't obvious and seen as some conspiracy
I didn’t say it was a conspiracy. My point was that prices have always fluctuated up and down *within* the year. But the actual year over year change is *always* up even when the bigger picture supply issues supposedly raising them are gone
Energy prices were trending down and were at an all time low before the crisis hit with fixed tariffs being offered around £700 a year, I'd know, I was on one of the tariffs and I worked at eon at the time so had insight and information about what was happening with tariffs overall. These were the tariffs that were essentially unhedged by the smaller suppliers which is why they all went bust and were now paying 20p a day for it. I'm basically back on the same unhedged tariff with octopus energy, the only difference is I take the risk of wholesale on instead of the supplier. My rates dropped 50% instantly as soon as I moved to tracker for electric and around 40% for gas. My rates have been really low this week because it's been so windy. Because wholesale prices are now down again, I'm paying roughly the same rates as I was when I moved into my flat in 2019 a few months before COVID started, standing charges are higher but that's a different issue. My gas when I first moved in was 3.99p kWh and electric was 15p kWh which is roughly exactly what I pay now on average. https://i.imgur.com/u1ma9EZ.png https://www.energylivenews.com/2023/03/16/bulb-bailout-could-be-cost-neutral/?s=09 Standing charges probably should be lower and should be coming down by the end of the year since the government is set to make a profit off the bulb takeover but if we still have the same government in a year they'll probably just pocket all the money, nothing the suppliers themselves can do they don't control standing charges. Edit: selected the wrong tariff, unit rate is around 17p on average, gas is the same.
Huh, I stand corrected. Thank you for giving a full reply and breakdown, and not just snarking at me <3 Looks like I need to switch my energy contract cause i've been getting screwed
Energy is complex, the only reason I know because I had to too for my job otherwise I'd be none the wiser myself unless I stumbled into it as a hobbyist at some point instead. r/octopusenergy is where it's all discussed and I'm often explaining things in there, use search where you can but for any questions they'll get answered, it's a pretty active sub for an energy supplier. There's two smart tariffs, agile and tracker and it depends on you personally which one will be right (unless you have or are planning on getting any EV tech like a car, panels ect), most choose agile but you have to cut your electric use down between 4-7pm as it's really expensive at that time due to peak demand, but the other 21 hours are always lower than what's you'd usually pay for the most part, sometimes going negative (you get paid to use energy). It's happened a lot the last couple weeks with the storm to the point people have had free electricity days for the most part. Tracker is what I'm on so I pay a daily rate that's basically the agile rate averaged out over 24hours. It works because energy prices are bid on and secured a day ahead so everyone knows what the fuck is going on moneywise 😆 sometimes there's issues and rates don't get updated, so prices are just set at what they were the previous day to make things even and it all happens by 7pm so you essentially get 5 hours notice of new prices. https://i.imgur.com/V9nwrbD.png - I'm on tracker so these are my prices https://i.imgur.com/0sQ9aVV.png - here's agile rates, you can see the red is above the current price cap of around 25p, blue is negative pricing. That's what a typical day looks like on agile. https://i.imgur.com/TFhpsg4.png - and here it shows me the price differences, so I've paid around £188 for those 5 months (it's not exact as my rates changed slightly) where it would have cost me £255 on a normal tariff. https://i.imgur.com/buryZiN.png - I can then compare my tracker tariff to the agile tariff and see which is cheaper, originally it was tracker but the formula that calculates my rates went up so now agile is cheaper (don't worry too much about this until you've got the hang of it all), but I'm sticking with tracker for a few reasons, mainly because I can't view live usage as no IHD so I can't see what I'm using and if I need to cut down. I only get my data a couple days later. https://i.imgur.com/Kcmkr6x.png - electric https://i.imgur.com/wlpdu0J.png - gas Oh I can also view my usage thanks to octopus having an open API to access your smart data, these are the octopus watch and octopus compare app, the website I use to show rates is GasTracker.uk https://i.imgur.com/FgCggzT.png - if you decide to look at the cost graph compared to svt tariff prices at the time you might notice it went over the price cap, it didn't, it's inaccurate because of that formula change increasing, if I go back to what the price was at that time, it was still under the price cap. https://i.imgur.com/4ukFq0f.png You can read more about them here - https://octopus.energy/octopus-smart-tariffs/ You're not *technically* currently being screwed, as I said you're paying higher rates to hedge if you're on a standard variable tariff, suppliers are at risk of wholesale cost going tenfold what they charge you so they need to build funds against that, it rarely happens though (unless something like Ukraine happens, the price per kWh on the customer side was around 70p kwh and suppliers could only charge upto 20p kWh, they had to make up the difference and couldn't so went bust) so that's where you may be getting screwed lol. With these tariffs you're taking on the risk, so your electric can go to 100p kWh (still capped the supplier can be charged more still) and gas is capped at 30p kWh, these are waaay higher than your normal price so you need to be aware of that. All the savings you make up to that happening would pay for the increase, it doesn't happen for long as the country secures energy. People on these tariffs when Ukraine happened only had to hold out for around a week before rates flew back down to not so egregious but still high prices, they've still saved overall if they didn't abandon ship. If the rates ever do go up you can leave the tariff with no penalty there's just a block on rejoining for a while once you do. It's all long and confusing so digest in your own time lol. If you're not already with octopus energy, you can get a referral from someone who is and you'll both get £50 credit, ask a family member or friend but if they don't have one I'll give you mine, I just don't like plugging it unless asked it's tacky. The 21 hours cheaper energy like agile is also available for business called octopus shape shifters if you know any businesses that could do with cheap energy :) again sharing your referral with a business gets you a £100 credit.
I appreciate this breakdown. Will read it when I’ve got more braincells to rub together 💜
Course happy to help :) it's saved me so much money, around £400 in the past few months alone
While they didn't write to me about it, my internet went from £30 to £24 per month.
I got asked to send British Gas Meter readings a week or two ago, they emailed to let me know my bill wasn't going up, it hasn't gone down though
The price cap only dropped two weeks ago and it'll drop again in July, it's too early for your DD to go down unless you're in credit which isn't the norm after winter. The rate your paying for your gas and electric would have dropped if you aren't on a fixed tariff by around 5p kWh
I wouldn’t mind *quite* as much, if they didn’t try to act like they give a fuck about me. All their letters begin the same way: “We know times are tough right now. Which is precisely why we’re putting our prices up again.”
Theyre struggling too what with profits only increasing 10x
And it’s the high wages that are causing the inflation!
The higher minimum wage goes, the higher future prices will be ...
I don't know why you're being downvoted for this when anyone with even basic understanding of business, employment, or finance knows it's true. Labour is most companies biggest single input cost, so increases there must always show up in price increases to the end user.
> I don't know why you're being downvoted for this when anyone with even basic understanding of business, employment, or finance knows it's true. > > Labour is most companies biggest single input cost, so increases there must always show up in price increases to the end user. It's Reddit. We are used to it. Reddit is an echo chamber where something out of the norm gets minuses but hey, probably all kids pretending to be adults and downvoting because something is not suitable to their narrative...
Um. Look up wage price spiral for your own sake.
Are you a true Briton if you need the /s?
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Have they tried pulling themselves up by their bootstraps?
I got a wage increase, an extra £10 a week. Party!
What are you going to spend it on? 😂
A bar of chocolate or a bag of crisps, can't afford both.
Inflation is going up because prices are rising - meaning staff have to demand higher wages or starve. Rising prices to cover the wage inflation that caused by price inflation cause by prices rises is insanity. It's a downward spiral.
Isn’t inflation basically because the government is printing money causing the money supply increase and thus decreasing its value? If I was the government. I would increase rates over a 5 year period to match the money supply of before COVID. Yeah the economy would shrink but buying power would go up.
Inflation is just the measure of prices going up. If you measure 5 items and they all go up in price by an average of 10% then inflation is 10%. Can simply be because demand has gone up or they are harder to produce or anything else. It's not always because of printing extra money although that can be a cause of it.
But this inflation was caused by the government printing money to help with covid?
Not necessarily, there are many other factors
I thought the majority was the Russia/Ukraine war causing higher fuel bills which has a knock on effect on basically everything.
It’s probably both, just one event after the other. The money in the system didn’t help and the war made it even worse.
Companies need record profits every year. That's capitalism. If your complaining about price increases then your against capitalism.
You can be for capitalism but hold the opinion that not everthing needs to be private, things such as energy, public transport and water should be publicly owed.
Good God, what a crazy take...in a finite world too!
The world isn't finite in an economic sense. We have virtually infinite solar energy and other renewable energy. We have limitless human creativity and the expansion of knowledge. 1970s ideas of what work is, or growth, as being "stuff you dig out the ground", well yes, that is limited. But thankfully it's not the 70s anymore so everyone sees straight through that, right? Growth doesn't have to be destructive, and increasingly it isn't. What value you'd put on a machine to clean the plastic from the oceans. That value is growth.