News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Next headline at the end of this quarter:
"Procter and Gamble sees record profits for the billionth year in a row!"
Exactly. The supply chains of a company like that are incredibly opaque, even if it's a publicly traded company. How are we, the consumers, to know what a fair tariff price offset is?
It's one thing if the product is made entirely in one country and imported whole by a seller. Someone in China makes a widget out of entirely Chinese parts, packages it in a China-made box, and sends it to the US, ready for store shelves? Well if the tariff goes up by 25%, no reasonable person could fault the import seller of that product for raising their prices by 25%.
But a big consumer company like P&G? They're a multinational conglomerate. Even simple products like clothes detergent may have a dozen different ingredients from a dozen different countries. Some of those compounds have to go back and forth across borders multiple times as they go through various stages of chemical refining. And the tariffs the chemical precursors will be hit with may vary based on the chemical involved. It's hard for the company itself to estimate what the fair break-even amount they should raise prices by to offset tariffs. What hope does the average consumer have?
So companies, being heartless monsters, see an obvious opportunity. Maybe after a thorough analysis of their supply chain by people with very fancy credentials, they conclude that they need to raise prices by 17% to evenly offset the tariffs. That's the fair number; that's just what's needed to break even. But it took a whole team of business and logistics experts to come up with that number. No consumer will be able to check their work. So...what's to stop them from using this as a chance to reap some profit? Tell customers that you need to raise prices by 25%. How will they know the difference?
And this is how you end up with corporations making record profits. Supply chains are too complex for consumers to determine what a fair price increase is to offset tariffs. So companies can figure out that fair number, add some additional profit margin to it, and just blame it all on the tariffs. Never let a good crisis go to waste!