No Stupid Questions

Cutting back on spending is the only thing I know that works. When consumers don’t buy things, the prices come down.

For groceries this means splurging less, avoiding things you don’t need (drink tea instead of soda, don’t buy snacks and chips). Fruits and vegetables are definitely still cheaper than prepared foods in many cases. Even when frozen. And they can be used to make a meal stretch, along with beans and rice.

Buy cheap bar soap and store brands of basic things.

Coupons aren’t really a thing anymore, but you can use the app for stores like the grocery, Target, Walmart, to “clip” deals and save.

A lot of the high prices right now are just greed. They aren’t tied to actual supply chain or labor issues. A grocery store in France just told PepsiCo to take a hike because their prices were so outrageous.

If you want the government to get involved, I encourage you to write your representatives about enforcing existing anti-trust laws. The mega mergers and buyouts are driving prices up because of less competition. Kroger wants to buy Albertsons for example. That just means more layoffs and higher grocery prices.

Hope this helps.

Voting is necessary but not sufficient.

The big other thing is to build external power. That’s not like militias per se (though with the rising fascism it’s not a bad idea), but rather stuff like gardening, learning to do repairs, and practicing mutual aid. Reduce your and your community’s dependence on the corporations. And make it an issue people around you care about.

Unironically the answer is "shop less."

Prices on goods rise when demand for goods stays sufficient to support the price going up. The less everyone buys, the less things will cost.

Prices for goods have almost nothing to do with the price of rent, but the mechanisms there are the same - it's just that you have to encourage building rather than "live somewhere less" because the second option really isn't tenable, for obvious reasons.

If you want rent to come down, campaign for, vote for, or even run for office to be the candidate that will change zoning laws and encourage building multifamily housing.

Cry and hope for a revolution. Since the Supreme Court decided money is speech, we have no power. Representatives don't care about their constituents unless a message comes with a "charitable donation". The rich are seemingly immune to laws, but somehow there's a surplus of money available to fuck over the little guy. This is a failed country of the corporations, and for the corporations.

Short answer: get paid more

Medium answer: become unionized so that you can bargain collectively for more pay instead of individually. It's like forming a political party with your labour, and then voting for yourself

Stop buying their shit. Obviously there's things you need to live and that's fine but stop wasting your money and making them rich by buying all the ancillary shit.

Join a union and demand more money to pay for it.

France has the right idea about what we were supposed to do.

The only solution is to demand more money and buy less. Buying less will decrease demand and cut their profits, having more money will cover inequity.

This pretty much already happened with the “nobody wants to work” bullshit. People moved to better jobs, and jobs that could no longer pay a living wage either raised wages or closed their doors. Workers need to keep demanding more, unionizing, and raising wages to keep the money in their pockets. The people complaining are complaining they can’t have 4 car garages when the employees can’t afford rent. Fuck those people.

Eat the rich. Bring back the guillotine.

Plant a vegetable garden. Build a rain catchment system. Build a solar power system. Read books instead of consuming other media. Buy only local. Start a consumer or retail cooperative. Don't participate in wanton consumerism.

Voting in the US doesn't yield desirable results because of the gerrymandering and the voting system; however most changes which directly affect people are made at a grassroots level so participate in activities at a grassroots level.

vote for people who are in favor of regulations

While it isn't magic, there is a newfound pressure on the Democratic party to finally break some meaningful ground.

Unfortunately one of the biggest obstacles had been the radically conservative Supreme Court.

Simple arithmetic tells us that if just two Supreme Court Justices were to suddenly disappear from our reality, and re-emerge in another, the court would lean more progressive to allow debt relief, bodily autonomy, and hopefully more.

While there are many ways to suddenly remove people from our plane of existence, there's no proven way to have them re-emerge in another. Obviously it would be illegal and deeply unethical to suggest such removal without the safe relocation to another plane.

So I guess just learn to kiss fascist ass 🤷‍♂️

You may not like the answer but you need to continue working the political process further upstream and more deeply. It’s easy to just vote for the president every 4 years and then think the system doesn’t work. But it’s too late to have any kind of effect that late in the process. Find more progressive candidates to support and vote in your primaries to support them. Volunteer and help them get out the vote. And do this even if the candidate you like is across the country somewhere, because having more progressive candidates overall helps move the Overton window and shift the party over time. And when you’ve lost the primary and don’t have a progressive choice, do the least bad thing and keep the regressive candidate from winning. You may spend all your life doing all this only for some limited victories and a small net shift if any, but that’s the lot of one person among 300 million. It’s a hell of a lot more impact than the vast majority of people will have. And it’s just the beginning of what you can do. Join a union or run for office yourself and make a more direct impact.

Of course we all live with limitations but few of us are doing as much as we could actually do. I know this well because I have some blue collar friends busy with jobs and kids who still do about 400x more than I do.

I think food riots are just a few years off, really. Maybe when enough stock is stolen and enough stores trashed they will learn, but I expect they will try to be heavy handed, sending in the local WalMart Defense Team (a.k.a. the police force closest to a given walmart) to handle it, but there are definitely going to be problems with that considering some people go to walmart armed.

Thieve from big corpos. Don't feel bad about it. They don't.

Molotovs are always an option.

If you want to live through 80's dystopian books on this subject, we all need to start learning how to hack; compromise these company's networks, take down their supply chain. In the end, we're enabling them. We can either give up because there are too many of them, or educate ourselves on their weaknesses.

Eat. The Rich.

They don't move much, I love fatty cuts 🤤

Lower consumption

Not buying things is probably the most accessible course of action. I haven't bought a carton of eggs in probably over a year now. Yes, I heard prices went back down. But you know what? Fuck 'em. Companies can't just price-gouge and then pretend everything's cool.

I take stuff from work.

You need to be the example you want to see in this world. Buy ZERO Corporate.

That’s it.

Delete subscriptions. Replace your music collection with pirated MP3s. Same with movies.

Learn to cook.

Obviously you’ll have to buy gas. Nothing is perfect.

Make a start.

Seek out the competitors to near monopolies? I heard somewhere that all glasses are built and sold by one company (that then sells them to a bunch of different companies so it looks like there is competition), and they can charge incredible markups. There probably are very small companies that make and sell glasses that don't have the economies of scale or ad budgets to get the word out. If enough people bought from them, the monopoly would have to lower prices to their "kill competitors" level to steal back the market-share (or just buyout the little guy). Once dead or absorbed, they can go back to incredible mark-ups, which means we can start the cycle over again and find a new little guy to support.

That or support the maker movements so that anything we need we can just make ourselves (3D printing, bio-hacking, hydroponics and seed banks, general lathe and mill loner libraries, open source software, etc...)

What are we to do?

Pay. AFAIK you don't have any other rights.

Vote?

Yes. Never vote for a rich person anymore :-)

General strike/protest? Get enough people making noise on the street and people will have to listen. With a presidential election coming up, Dems won't be able to fully ignore it either.

Buying clubs, when you and all your neighbors and friends buy directly from producers can cut out a lot of the graft. This lowers prices, connects you to your neighbors, and lowers the divide between the rural and urban. There may already be buyers cooperatives local to you. Some even give food based on volunteering.

My favourite theory of revolution is where these clubs start to encroach into housing and medicine. Eventually you have an economy based on mutual dependence and responsibility.

One thing I've noticed is that people I know have 2 problems.

1. they might not know what things should cost. If the prices rises, I notices it right away. I shop at the same grocer and know the standard price of everything I buy. I notice a price increase when I pull it off the shelf. Most my friends don't notice a price increase until they check out.

2. My friends that do notice a price increase never substitute or change their meals. They will still buy the same meals. Even if the stuff they need go on sale every other week. I've found that usually most my stuff I can still buy on sale at least 1 or 2 times per month.

These two problems mean that our generation doesn't really put much pressure on stores to keep prices low.

Rent: Housing costs in America are entire caused by a supply shortage due to limitations on supply. We can literally build as much housing as we want and set the market rate at anything, but since the 60s America hasn't built much and the little we have built has been expensive single family homes. This is a choice voters have made for 60 years, but voters can also make other choices.

Bend over and Get fucked

If you can't afford food, heat, rent, etc., apply for assistance from things like SNAP and other programs (local, state and federal). Call 211 for information on available resources in your area.