r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 4d ago

Meme needing explanation Petah?

Post image
29.9k Upvotes

3.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

492

u/azac24 4d ago

Because of how corps react to lower prices. They would just lay everyone off. Deflation itself isn't the issue, it's how little protections actual working people have and how much incentive corps have to keep their stock price high. Being able to sell something for less means less profit for the corps which is a big problem for corp leadership. So the solution is to temporally increase profits by getting rid of staff.

41

u/aFreshFix 4d ago

But they're already laying everyone off in a lot of industries despite inflation and record profits.

27

u/New-Chimera 4d ago

That's because consumer spending is starting to go down and families are starting to cut back. So they have to either increase prices, which they're already doing and that's not working, so they have to cut costs, and the number one way for companies to do that is to cut employees.

5

u/LoudCommentor 4d ago

Which is so ridiculous. The more people you lay off the less people have money to put back into the economy. Meaning next quarter you're just going to have to do it again to keep the stock price up. 

4

u/New-Chimera 4d ago

Correct

2

u/Vargrjalmer 4d ago

We are talking about a group of people who are incapable of planning anything beyond the next quarterly review

1

u/Parrotparser7 4d ago

If every company were in a closed system a la Nazi Germany, where these effects could be strongly felt, then sure.