Quote Originally Posted by Furryrat View Post
And just to finish it off, Taco Bell is just a brand owned and operated by Yum! brands, a spinoff from PepsiCo in the late 90s, which also owns KFC and Pizza Hut. Yum! Brands (Stock ticker YUM, down ~30% this year) is the publicly traded entity and has come up short the last 2 quarters due to significant margin compression as a result of these increased food, freight, and labor costs. As I stated, and these are not 'arguments', when demand decreases, they can only maintain profitability by cutting costs in one of these three areas. Labor is the only one that they have direct control over, and being good corporate citizens by running into the red to keep people employed is not a viable path for a publicly traded company.

All that aside, I like Yum! Brands as an investment (when the smoke clears and a bottom is found). Taco Bell and KFC are great, but ever since I recovered from covid, that damn original recipe just doesn't taste the same to me.
And so you injected a really worthless point about cost-push inflation, being a type of inflation, as relevant to these discussion of Big Oil profiteering during a national energy crisis? I pointed out a classic example of where cost-push is subject to the CHOICE of the corporation and you figured you'd push what I presume is a doctorate in macroeconomics or business management to support your theory Taco Bell is doing it wrong.

So, to recap, cost push inflation is a type of inflation which may decrease profits or be used to increase prices of consumers at the risk of demand destruction. Big Oil meanwhile hasn't seen a substantial increase in costs as again, their average publicly disclosed expense for well maintenance is $35 per barrel. Supply is constrained domestically by the active choice of Big Oil not to reinvest massive profits into capital expenditures and as a result of the API coordinated idling of production in 2020 to support market prices. Yes we've lost a fraction of imported oil (700,000) from our Russian embargo, but that doesn't justify the current illegal profiteering.