If I'm correctly reading into the history and motivations of corporations, this is part of them donning their hot dog suit and saying that they're trying to figure out why everyone is mysteriously poor.

After that, they'll put on a ROCK/BAND shirt, a backwards hat, and carry a skateboard before explaining that this "poor" is hitting everyone the same. And they'll lay off thousands or millions more than they already have

Then...
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After proving once again that they're the "job makers," they'll get their emergency loans, buy out weaker competition, and everyone will accuse them of foul play.

Finally, they'll hire everyone back at fractions of their previous pay, even though the cost of living will have disproportionately risen as well. People will fight, there will be strikes, and then the bleed will be slowed, but not stopped, by the companies "giving in to demands" that are actually neutered facsimiles of the original bargaining proposals. But everyone will be too tired and poor to continue fighting. We'll all ask our politicians how this could have happened and why they still trust the corporations. Then we get to watch the old song and dance all over again:

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"prepare three envelopes"

Thats not what's going on.

Retailers have commissioned surveys to determine that people are already out of money.

They use this to create a narrative and promote the idea that additional interest rate rises are unnecessary because people are already broke to additional interest rate hikes will just create a recession.

CEOs are all psychopaths because they're good at that kind of work :(

besides tech, most other stem jobs are pretty stagnant and low to begin with. yea trades might good for some people, that arnt prone to physical ailements but it seems its much more geared towards white people instead, plus the conservative culture of the industry. in construction is quite uncommon to see an asian person working there.

those same companies have spent 60+ years ensuring wages stay exactly where they were while prices increased?

This is not true.

Wages in the US adjusted for prices have generally been going up - but slowly - even since Reagan. This remains true - broadly - even if you look at the lowest income decile, but the growth is less:

So wages were stagnant for the bottom decile from 1980 to 2016, but rose since then. It is, however, not even correct to say that "wages stayed the same but prices went up" between 1980 and 2016, because those are inflation-adjusted figures: the price increases are already factored in.

From my point of view the capitalists are evil.

No. I'll do layoffs and slowly hire them back at lower wages. "Can we add a helipad to this fifth yacht?"

I made a ton of money building reporting systems which made it simple to identify this form of gaming sales numbers to fit targets.

Thank you.

But business and something about being more efficient or something like that.

name? i love trading a good shitco IPO

God, how I love people who throw acronyms around expecting everyone to know them

Steve Jobs actually mentioned this happens when leadership comes from a sales focused, rather then product focused, background. Everything becomes short term thinking, and then they dip when they see/reach the inflection point of their profit growth, and blame the inevitable company failure on the next guy

insurance for some, if you are using ACA soley(assuming your AGI is much higher than what your state will subsidize(pre-covid)) and not from a employer funded health insurance, your cost is also very high.

I'm really sorry about the hardships you face that are representative of an ongoing development over the last decades.
Moving more and ever more wealth into the pockets of the Epstein class is making that wealth missing elsewhere - the people who create that wealth by working are devoid of it.

Unless it's an immediate, justifiable need, say washing machine breaks down and using a laundromat for six months would eat up money better spent for the washing machine, this is just a good idea, anyway. Marketing companies are evil and sell based on implanting false and mutable emotional whims, the time spent considering gives those projected mutable emotions time to clear.

I'm afraid the AI bros have a plan to integrate AI everywhere and once it becomes clear that it's not economically viable to operate their AI nonsense, they'll whine about it being a systemic risk to have them go down.
Let's have the public bail out another sector that miscaculated financially and interweaved itself in ways with the world that letting the AI corpos go bankrupt will look like the worse of two scenarios...

And they aren't even paying the real price yet. AI companies hope to capture the market and make it big.

I used to go out for the day, and hit someplace for lunch. Now I eat lunch at home, and then go out. It's not even that fast food is so expensive, it's not even close to good any more.

It's not a trap, it's an intentional choice, and a very profitable one. Imagine you sell a lot of a product but costs make up 90% of revenue. Then you double the price and as a result sell half as much. Your costs stayed roughly the same, maybe went up a little. So now instead of making 10% profit, you are making 40-45% profit per item. Now imagine your sales declined by less than 50% and how much extra profit that would be.

Prior to the pandemic companies would be careful about raising prices. If they raised prices by 5% and lost 10% of sales, that was less profitable than not increasing the price. But the legit supply chain shortages during the pandemic made them realize that a larger subset of customers were willing to pay significantly higher prices than they thought, and they also realized they had less competition than they thought, and now everything costs double and we all just call it inflation, because that's what inflation is. When the price of everything goes up at the same time.

It will continue until either there is nothing left of the upper middle class, or the upper middle class stops paying. The poor and lower middle class are already priced out, and companies do not care.