How do you explain cereal being $8 a box, when it was $5 pre-COVID …
Two things:
We shut down the economy, and supply got disrupted because the economy isn’t a thing you can just turn off for a period of time and have it come back on again
We shut down the economy in non-equal fashion leading to some stores being forced to close while others were allowed to remain open. This led to reduced competition among those supplying the cereal. Competition works to reduce prices, and we killed the competition. The covid lockdowns were a government-enforced consolidation of the market. There are fewer players, each of which owns a larger share now.
Two things:
We shut down the economy, and supply got disrupted because the economy isn’t a thing you can just turn off for a period of time and have it come back on again
We shut down the economy in non-equal fashion leading to some stores being forced to close while others were allowed to remain open. This led to reduced competition among those supplying the cereal. Competition works to reduce prices, and we killed the competition. The covid lockdowns were a government-enforced consolidation of the market. There are fewer players, each of which owns a larger share now.