Supply chains, worker wages and the price of energy has been blamed for the current bout of high inflation. But central bankers around the world are starting to clue in to something consumers have been aware of for a while — corporations just aren’t afraid to raise their prices anymore.
Part of this is due to sprawly car infrastructure and lack of density. In Vancouver, there are small immigrant run grocers where the price has barely gone up at all. Persia Foods, Kim’s, etc.
At the peak of car culture, there were independent or small-chain grocery stores in every small city, town, or neighbourhood. You don’t need that much density to support a grocery store. They went away because the richer stores bought out competitors or drove them out of business, with the realization that removing some competition ad being the biggest fish in the pond left them in the position to dictate prices, both with suppliers, and with consumers.
This is a fundamental issue with our economic system. Everyone talks about competition in the market, and how the lack of it is the problem, but they all ignore the part where competitions are meant to be won, and this is what it looks like when winners start to be crowned.
I think you mean the advent of car culture.
Our current system relies on the economic externality of relying on private vehicles and private transportation on local infrastructure to artificially lower the transportation costs for grocery logistics. It’s much cheaper to run an 18-wheeler to a large grocery store on the edge of suburbia than running box trucks all over town. It doesn’t actually lower food costs, because people pay a large fraction of their income to that private transportation so that they can access that super-grocer, and then the grocer seems to jack up the price of food anyway.
I agree that there is more than one factor, but disagree that car culture is not one of them.
What is this mythical historical period of the “peak of car culture”? That’s today. Fewer people walk or cycle today than they did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s. We’re barely reversing course just recently. There are more big box stores and strip malls than in the past, which concentrates the market and doesn’t allow small competitors. Some significant portion of the blame goes to our shitty suburban sprawl city design.