If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I've got good news and bad news for Trump. The good news: you can get elected by promising to do something about the cost of living crisis, and the president actually has a lot of ways to improve people's daily costs. The bad news: everything you could do to fix working people's cost of living will make an oligarch worse off.
This is the essential conundrum of Trumpismo: to keep his base happy, he needs to make their lives better; but to make their lives better, he'll have to make oligarchs angry. The oligarchs' wealth bonanza caused the cost of living crisis. Oligarchs' pleasure causes our suffering, so alleviating our suffering will reduce their pleasure.
This means that while Trump can promise help with prices, all he can deliver is union-busting, ICE lynchings, and pointless wars, none of which have any hope of materially improving the lives of working people. Indeed, all of this stuff makes working people materially worse off, as wages fall, crops rot in the fields, and gas prices shoot through the roof.
Trump would dearly love to find an ox he can safely gore, but all the good oxen are owned by his oligarch chums. Trump can't punish Ticketmaster, because the billions Ticketmaster steals from the WWE, F1 and football fans in his base all land in the pocket of oligarchs who own stock in Ticketmaster, and Trump can't afford to upset those oligarchs:
Indeed, I can't think of a single corrupt racket that Trump can afford to do something about. Not even the only cost of living metric that can approach gas prices in the hierarchy of American electoral salience: grocery prices.
Your grocery bill went up because oligarchs price-gouge you. Eggflation was caused by Cal-Maine, the monopolist that owns every brand of eggs in your grocer's fridge, who jacked up prices because they knew they could:
Pepsi and Walmart conspired to force every retailer to jack up the prices of all Pepsi products (including Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Aquafina, etc) at every retailer's store, so that Walmart could also jack up their prices and still undersell their competition (naturally, Trump let them get away with it):
This stuff isn't exactly a secret. Grocery store owners hold earnings calls with their investors where they boast about the fact that they can raise their prices far in excess of their increased costs, and blame it on inflation:
They boast about their "personalized pricing" swindles, whereby they use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and jack up the prices you see in their apps:
Trump has the power to put a stop to all of this, but still, he can't, because his oligarch pals would squeal, and when they squeal, Trump jumps. In theory, Trump has lots of power, but in practice, Trump can't do anything.
Which brings me to the cost of meat. Meat inflation has raced ahead of other forms of food inflation, even as the payments to ranchers and other producers fell sharply, leading to waves of bankruptcies:
Partly, that's because meat processing is controlled by cartels, with 85% of all the beef being processed by four packers, and nearly every chicken going through one of four poultry processors. These middlemen jack up prices to grocers while colluding to push down the payments to their suppliers.
How do they rig those prices? After all, it's very illegal for these four companies to get together around a table to rig prices. Instead, they use a "price consultancy" called Agri Stats that does the price-rigging for them. Every week, the packers send a detailed list of all their costs and prices into Agri Stats, and Agri Stats "advises" them all to raise all their prices at once, and anyone who doesn't play along is pushed out of the Agri Stats cartel. Everyone wins – except families paying for groceries:
Agri Stats has been doing this since the Reagan years, but they grew steadily more brazen, until, back in 2023, Biden's DOJ brought history's most obvious, easily won antitrust case against them:
And wouldn't you know it, Trump just settled that case, in a way that will make Agri Stats much, much richer and give them far more opportunities to rig prices:
Under the terms of the settlement, Agri Stats must "allow" restaurants, farmers, and other parts of the supply chain to pay it for the data it consolidates. This will allow more parties to collude to rig prices, and provide more income to Agri Stats. As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, they've been "sentenced to make money."
Agri Stats isn't the only "price consultancy" that is used to launder a price-fixing cartel that's driving up the cost of living for all Americans, including Trump's base, in order to make oligarchs better off. Companies like Realpage do the same thing for residential rents:
Trump can't do anything about any of these scams, not without goring some oligarch's precious ox. But, as Dayen points out, there are dozens of Democratic state Attorneys General who can kill Trump's sweetheart deal for Agri Stats using the Tunney Act, which gives them standing to sue to force a federal judge to review the settlement and determine whether it is fair.
Whether any AG will seize the moment remains to be seen, of course, but it would be very good politics to do so – after all, the path to political power in America runs through credible promises to do something about the cost of living crisis.
It's funny because in 27 Dresses, a movie made in 2008 there's a line about how bakeries and florist mark up their prices because it's a wedding and the editor is like "No one cares!"
When in reality we do care. I care a lot that the same floral arrangement that I requested for my wedding was 200x more expensive than if ordered them on the same day
I care that my cake was 300x more expensive than when you order the same cake for a retirement party
And its crazy that they were talking about it in 2008 while in 2026 we have walmart doing dynamic prices on a can of beans
working at a grocery store should be enough to radicalize anyone
when I worked at loblaws, which is owned by one of the wealthiest families in canada, we were not permitted to put baby formula on the shelves. it had to go behind the customer service desk, because too many people were stealing it. being that I'm of the opinion that no one should have to pay to eat, I pretended not to know store policy and put it on the shelves anyway. the cheapest of baby formulas cost more than a quarter of what I made in an 8 hour shift. and yes, this is the same grocery chain that pays minimum wage to the majority of their workers, and student wage to workers under 18.
I saw someone banned from the store for attempting to shoplift diapers, another for taking bread. you know the age old "would you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family?"? yeah, a grocery chain owned by a billionaire family will ban you for that. and yes, this is the same grocery chain that admitted to a price fixing scheme based around the cost of bread.
the store manager instructed us to keep an eye out for people who "looked homeless", and to watch them while they were in the store to ensure that they didn't steal anything. and yes, this is the same grocery chain that denied drivers overtime wages unless they worked over 60 hours a week.
and we were unionized! imagine how they would have treated us if we weren't! and yes, this is the same grocery chain that blamed product theft on their workers.
basically, seeing the way that grocery stores underpay workers while boosting their prices and having over the top policies to prevent people from accessing basic human necessities should be enough to make anyone despise capitalism.
And surveillance pricing means that disabled and elderly people who shop online from home more often, may be even more exploited than those who do local in person shopping.
We Had 400 People Shop For Groceries. What We Found Will Shock You. More Perfect Union and Consumer Reports Dec 9, 2025
My letter to reps:
Surveillance pricing ought to be outlawed, and there should never be a time you are compelled to be surveilled just to buy something. I saw the Consumer Reports video and it's offensive. And no grocery store or insurance company or business of any type should be overcharging some people because they are known to be more desperate or more willing to pay for something because of invisible "experiments" or collected data on their customers or from acquired personal data from data brokers who sell collected and data breach data. Surveillance pricing is wholly unfair, obviously immoral, and disgusting. It's particularly grotesque that the people more likely to be harmed by these business practices are disabled and elderly people who more often shop for groceries online for pickup or delivery. The people at these companies who do this to the customers should be criminally charged. It needs to be a CRIMINAL offense. OUTLAW SURVEILLANCE PRICING.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
We already have secret unseen societal credit scores.
