Canadian grocery stocks have been going up like absolute gangbusters lately.

That happened a decade ago. You can’t find many pet supplies anywhere anymore because one company owns the distributors and the stores – and they don’t give a shit because they’re American and Canada is too small of a market to support, so it’s left to wither and die.

The same with Veterinary services. They’ve all be bought up, made into chains, or signed bullshit distribution or service agreements by a single (American) company and now it costs many multiples what it used to for no reason except greed.

Where does the money for the investor’s dividends come from?

From overcharging just a little bit for everything, collaboratively. (In that case)

That’s why they’re doing so well.

Electrifying farm equipment has huge engineering hurdles. They need a massive amount of power, which would mean very large and incredibly expensive battery packs. Those batteries would take either a long time to charge, or high current charging stations.

During seeding or harvest the machines often run for 16+ hours a day, and are literally out in the middle of a field. Where is the super-fast charging station going to go? They can’t easily travel all the machinery back to home base every night, and there’s no way it makes economical sense for a farm operation to get chargers installed at every field.

These are not necessarily insurmountable problems. There are a number of similarities to trucking, for example, and that’s an industry that’s starting to see electrification now. But the logistical problems are much harder than trucking. The biggest reason that John Deere etc… aren’t making electric tractors right now is that no one would buy one, because no one has any infrastructure in place for it.

Are there any electric tractors/combines on the market, let alone used ones? I mean industrial sized, not small yard work equipment.

EDIT: OK, yes, there are some small electrified tractors available now. Fendt has a line available to customers, John Deere has a prototype, etc… But they are the smallest size of industrial tractors, meant for work like greenhouses, feeding livestock, municipal work, etc…

This isn’t surprising. It is basic economics.

We still need to ask why so we can get at the root of the problem. Shrugging and subsidizing is just telling galen weston “keep increasing your prices, and we’ll start throwing tax dollars at you.”

I’m so confused anytime someone blames “greed” for price increases.

First of all, corporations aren’t people. And therefore, they cannot since, and cannot be greedy. They are inhuman profit maximizing machines. They always have been. Blaming “greed” doesn’t make sense because (a) it anthropomorphizes corporations, (b) “greed” has been constant across this time frame.

If greed were to blame for these price increases, then why were prices not rising like this for every other year in living memory? Blaming greed for price increases is like saying a building burned down in a fire because of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Like… sure? I guess that’s true? But what is the takeaway? Being opposed to oxygen?

Back on topic - if you say the problem is greed, what policy proposals do you have to solve this problem? Greed is literally a biblical sin - what is your proposal to ban what is essentially one of the key components of human nature?

The Weston’s can’t survive in that castle on the paltry billions they have.

They need MORE!

Aren’t corporations ran by people? Who do you think decides on how a company operates?

Didn’t think I’d see support for Citizens United here, but I guess anything is possible…

Anyway, publicly traded corporations are subject to incentive structures that the market has created. Corporations are run by a CEO, but the CEO is elected by the board. The board, in turn, is elected by the shareholders. The shareholders are mostly mutual funds, which are funded by ordinary people.

If the CEO makes decisions which clearly reduce profitability, then they will be fired by the board. If the board doesn’t fire them, then the mutual fund managers will vote to replace the board. If the mutual funds don’t replace the board members, their funds won’t beat the market, and their investors will pull out and put their money elsewhere. And if none of them do any of that then another grocery store will raise prices as much as demand allows, increasing profits relative to the more “noble” grocery corporation, which will allow them to take on an influx of investment capital which they can then use to expand their market share and gain a competitive advantage over the their competition.

So ultimately, the “greedy” one is Bob, a middle manager in a nondescript office park in suburban Iowa who wants to invest his retirement funds somewhere with good returns so that he doesn’t have to work until the day he dies.

This is why Citizens United was a bad thing. It expanded the ability of inhuman, profit-maximizing machines to influence politics.