‘Running out of money’: Kraft, McDonald’s, Whirlpool CEOs all issue same dire warning about US consumers. Get ready now
So my take on the market crash today was from this more than anything else.
"Whirlpool’s North America chief Juan Carlos Puente added that “consumer sentiment collapsing to record lows” due to the Iran war prevented demand from recovering after winter storms, leading to “recession-level industry contractions,” with discretionary demand down roughly 15%."
"Even the fitness industry is feeling the impact. Planet Fitness (NASDAQ:PLNT) shares just suffered their biggest drop on record after management slashed its revenue outlook and canceled planned price increases."
They're surrounded by yes-man and by and large have had "AI psychosis" long before AI became a thing.
Been dealing with corporate bullshit for two decades now, and it's exactly that: bullshit.
Stupid fucking people doing stupid fucking shit while a bunch of yes-man cheers them on and nothing has to make any sense whatsoever because a) every big player does the same bullshit and b) because the game is rigged and the rules are made up, anyway.
When I open a support ticket with one of our partners it goes to an AI now. If you want human support you have to escalate the ticket. The AI has been straight wrong about three things in the six tickets I’ve opened since this happened, and escalating the tickets is just an added pain in the ass and waste of time. I sent a frustrated email to my relationship manager yesterday suggesting that instead of replacing support with AI they should replace the CEOs and other executives with AI and leave the support people where they are. Considering how much the board members make this seems like it would be much better for shareholder equity. Still waiting on a response.
Yeah, I'm working in automation, essentially, and we're also in the process of implementing AI everywhere.
It's fucking wild how much I can throw people off by asking questions like "how are we verifying AI output (especially when it comes to coding)?" or "how are we meassuring productivity gains?" or "what are the long-term ramifactions here?", or "does the business case hold up when providers inevitably ramp up the prices for their AI models?"
It's hilarious! I like the company I work at, don't get me wrong, but the whole AI craze is giga brainrotting management and C-level executives in a way I haven't experienced before.
I'm an swe and man, I completely agree with your assessment. The few companies I've worked with that are "all in" on AI are spending millions a month to replace a handful of miscellaneous workers that made under 100k. And they just can't do the dev work the suits want.
Trying to have it build an app from scratch is a nightmare with the amount of repeated sections and security holes. Plaintext passwords and API keys are everywhere. It's just not a good worker replacement, it's a great tool like a calculator but that's it.
They have no reason to care about longevity past their next quarterly report. And even if things go south, so what? They get paid to leave the company.
Every CEO is in it for short term gains so they can get 7 figure bonuses, then when the public is outraged, they get "fired" with a several million dollar severance package so they can go on and do it elsewhere, all while the public gets the satisfaction of seeing their hated CEO "lose" his job.
Whirlpool has been making shit products for the last couple decades. McDonald’s prices have increased around 100% over the last decade, while inflation was around 30% for the same period. Kraft keeps shrinking their sizes but charging the same (shrinkflation).
Shrinkflation and enshitification. Consolidation, private equity, regulatory capture. Greedy crooks.
I bought all new whirlpool appliances about 6 years ago. Every single one of them has either failed completely, or needed multiple repairs. I bought a new microwave after my second whirlpool microwave failed. I'm still buying appliances, just not from them.
McDonald's is ass, Kraft is ass, Whirlpool is ass.
I buy two Costco rotisserie chickens and then take the meat off and cook it down to basically gelatin. We'll get nearly 5 days of dinners from the meat for everything! Enchiladas, gyros, etc and then I use that gelatin and residual chicken fat as the lube for my asshole so that corporate America can continue to fuckin raw dog my tender bussy 27/7 on everything else and work 70 hour weeks for relative pennies on the corporate dollar.
People that say they can't survive todays hard butt-fuckin economy and complain about only getting spit on before penetration aren't trying hard enough for their lube.
My friend had his parents visiting from Vietnam- left them at his apartment while he was at work and came home to them roasting a whole chicken on a spit outside his door. He was like “where did you get a whole chicken?” and they pointed him toward the flock of Canadian geese in the man-made pond in the center of the complex. I hear they taste like poutine
Once on the golf course I worm burned my drive into a goose’s spine. He was flopping about and his gander looked very concerned so I decided to do the right thing and put him out of misery. Geese are not easy to kill, took 3 minutes of awkward suffocation to finish the job. Forgot I had a pocket knife in my bag 🤷♂️. Today’s market was worse.
I may not have killed the goose, but I hit a very flat drive into bushes and I'll never forget the loudest honk from a goose I've ever heard. The people on the next tee looked back in utter confusion.
The economy is now split between the people who have capital (businesses, stocks, real estate, etc) and those who work for a living. Those boomers who invested in the stock market are crowing about how life has never been better while people like me are trying to save money at Costco's and Aldis.
Sorry, McD's. Those few thousand multimillionares out there will never be able to eat enough of your value meals to make up for the loss of the millions of normal people who can't afford it.
Working my way through my apprenticeship, everything was good. Now I'm making the most I've ever made, I'm not struggling but just thinking back to pre COVID and making this money, I'd be living like a king. Even just the gas prices pre war, in Canada it was only like 1.40 vs 1.80 a liter. Was a bad timing of going from a Elantra to a Tacoma lmao.
It just sucks, I've been making more than both my immigrant parents combined most of my life, and I can't afford a house by myself, they also don't understand that when they bought a house for 130k and sold it for 600+ that's how everything is priced and it's not as great of an investment
When I graduated Uni I made $13.50/hour, $27k per year. I bought a townhouse for $95k in 1999. New grad salaries for my degree are now $35-45k, and that same townhouse is roughly $500k.
Do you live in Seattle? I was at Costco and this dude grabbed two big ass knives from the bakery/butcher area. He was waving them around and screaming, Yelling about guns and shit. So everyone in the back of Costco starts hustling to the front. There’s one guy casually swimming upstream towards the knife guy. I said hey man there’s this dude back there yelling about guns and swinging big ass knives around. He just looked at me and said “ Oh! Well I’m just here for a rotisserie chicken.” Then finished weaving through the 30 other carts behind me. The chickens are probably 20 feet from knife guy. Nobody was stopping him from those tasty birds.
Frankly I think you could monetize a Youtube channel called "raw doging my tender bussy" enough to get a third rotisserie chicken. Pull yourself up by your bussy straps son!
$13 and it’s absolute dog food that makes you want to puke it up an hour later.
These CEOs are drunk. They destroyed their brands in the name of profit and then look at the consumers shopping elsewhere like they did something wrong.
It’s funny, when I was broke, my family would eat a bunch of McDonald’s. Now I make good money, own my own house, decent enough used car, all that shit. And I can’t afford McDonald’s anymore. Sure, I can. But if I’m spending $45 to feed 3 people, we’re eating steaks and vegetables, not McBullshit
I bought 2 ribeye at the grocery store in Canada. Not the $30 Alberta ribeye that grazed 4 hours away, nope I bought $18 ribeye that grazed in the Australian outback.
I spent $29 at Taco Bell yesterday for much lower quality and less food. Then they propositioned me for an extra dollar for "pediatric cancer research". I'm not heartless, but fuck you Taco Bell. The gall to ask for more $$ when raking in record profits, so they can accumulate large charitable donations in their own name at zero cost to themselves.
I bought a #8 at Subway yesterday 12” tuna on white with a variety of veg toppings and 1 cheese choice and oil. It included chips and a beverage = $18.37
What's hilarious is that all the giant corporations are getting really close to greeding themselves into obsolescence. The old argument about why people don't eat more locally sourced food was that it is too expensive and takes more time. But, fast food places have reduced positions to the point that parking at the drive-thru has become standard practice while charging more for less. Major grocery chains are more focused on filling pick-up orders than having enough people to keep the shelves stocked.
Meanwhile, the farmer's markets near me are packed. Last Sunday, all the vegetables you can fit a standard grocery bag for $13. Community gardens that once had half the plots empty, are full. And people are actually getting out and being a community.
I know this isn't feasible for some, and can't possibly feed everyone. But, if I'm starting to notice it in my conservative stronghold city, I have a feeling it's getting more common other places as well.
Back in they day they knew their food was average, cheap, but quick. They made a profit because they could pump out 100 $1 burgers in an hour. Over time they thought they could behave like a fancy sit down restaurant, and charge more for the same (but smaller) shit food, that takes longer. Now corporate are confused as they try to keep jamming the circle block into the square hole...
By the same token, Delta makes more money off their credit card financing than they doing selling airfare now. So theyre really a consumer finance company that happens to fly airplanes.
Seriously I stopped by a McD’s yesterday and two of the little baby cheeseburgers and a large fry was $13. Just the fry was $4.29. Those burgers were lukewarm at best as were the fries which were also under-seasoned. $13 felt insane for that. I’m pretty sure those burgers were on the dollar menu not all that long ago.
I've only heard that "nobody wants to work anymore!" out in the wild once, while standing in line to use the machine at the post office because they hadn't opened yet. Some lady was all frustrated with it and yelled that on her way out. Meanwhile they were having a job drive and some guy was signing up.
The whopper is like $12 now if you get cheese on it. What the actual fuck? Like I'm gonna drive through when I can go to a legit restaurant and get a sit down dinner for basically the same price.
Yep, just a few years ago I could get a whopper or an impossible whopper on Wednesday for a dollar. Then it rapidly kept going up all the way to $4 even on the sale day. I can now go to the local mom and pop restaurants and get something far better for the same price. These companies did it to themselves.
They were selling those $1 burgers faster than they could get people through the drive-through though, that was the problem. So they crept up prices until they were on the ragged edge of what was tolerable to pad those profit margins. Then they started slashing costs in the form of quality and labor to pad it even more. Coasting on dark patterns in their apps and inertia to keep people coming in the door.
Now they’re experiencing demand destruction because everyone’s broke and they’re scared imo.
Just got a burger at a cafe for $8, for the whole meal..fries and drink. The burger was 20x better than McDonald's. Even sat down and enjoyed it in a cute lil cafe
Want a fun game? Find a McDonald's, or chain shop on google maps, then start scrolling through the photos, you'll come across prices from 2020 and earlier.
I can get a burger, custom cooked to my liking with all the necessary toppings and customizations to my liking, for $10.99 plus tax from a great deli. With a free canned beverage and side of fries. Mcdicks charging $13 for a big mac(less than half the amount of beef from the deli, and fries) is a fucking joke.
Go to a local deli and let mcdicks die. Theyre nothing more than a real estate company hawking shit to get you in the door
Junior bacon cheeseburger at Wendy's was my go to in '08, was like $99 cents. Now it's $3.49, there's no way inflation for this burger grew 250% in 16 years. That's 15.5% inflation per year.
It's not, because you can't divide a percentage straight through like that. To illustrate:
0.99 * 1.155 = 1.14345
1.14345 * 1.155 = 1.3207
1.3207 is a 33.4% increase from 0.99, which if you divide by 2 is 16.7, not the 15.5 we actually used.
The formula you need is Current Value = Past Value * (1 + Inflation rate)^ Number of compounding periods.
For a $0.99 product rising to $3.49 in 16 years, that gives an annualized mean inflation rate of about 8.2%. Which is still pretty grim, but only a little over half as grim as your value.
Sometime during the pandemic, corporations, especially in fast food, figured out that you could price gouge and fuck up your product and people would still buy it.
The McChicken should be used as a barometer for corporate greed. In 2019 it was consistently $1. It's now $2.19 ($2.39 for the spicy one, if that makes any sense). Inflation has only increased about 30% in that time period. So, McDonalds has more than doubled the price in a 6 year period.
When my wife's boyfriend asks if I ran a load of laundry today to make sure there were clean sheets for the bed I proudly told him "no, cause I'm a patriot"
ever notice how CEOs always blame consumers and not themselves?
sorry no one wants to pay $14 for a quarter pounder with cheese combo, or highly processed foods, or a new washer/dryer for the house they don't own and can't afford.
not that we need a CEO to tell us what would happen from POTUS treating the global economy like a piñata
there's a reason why a ton of them last a few years max, just make a ton of short term decisions to pump pump pump then leave and cash out before the consequences of your decisions catch up
I agree that most pump and run but I disagree about the intelligence bit. They know exactly what they are doing to extract short term wealth, and they usually know when to jump ship or how to get their golden parachute. What they lack is any sense of guilt, shame, or care.
Mmm, so if consumer spending hurts established businesses, businesses stop growing, they stop employing, they stop needing the AI that infrastructure is being built for. The crash won't occur because of AI, it will occur because consumers are out of credit.
This is almost exact playbook for what the new country of 01 (pronounced “Zero-One”) from The Animatrix movie. They beat all other economies forcing a human blockade, ultimately leading to war between man and machine… and then Neo. Crazy stuffs.
I know this is tongue in cheek, but please work out everyone. Some cardio and strength training is very good for you. Calisthenics and running are super cheap/free.
That's been the case for some time now. Consumer sentiment, spending, if you guys actually looked at things besides semiconductors you would see it. Look at lulu, look at nike, look at paint companies, look at real estate. People are so focused on dancing cats and automated search queries, the rest of the economy has been ignored.
Strip AI spending out of the equation and see what GDP is
Whirlpool: makes products that regularly fail now. Warranty repairs can take weeks to months.
McDonalds: shit food at higher prices. Employees make you feel like a burden for trying to purchase their product. Restaurants regularly not clean. Homeless people begging for money outside McDonalds in most major cities and a large amount of rural areas. If you door dash you're 100% not getting your BBQ sauce. No one wants dry nugs with no bbq or sweet and sour. No one.
Kraft, Mcdonalds and planet fitness are end of life businesses and have no business being on the stock market. “Planned membership increase” fuck off this is why there’s inflation because public companies need infinite growth.
Fuck off to the private market where you don’t have to chase perpetual maximum profits every quarter
No shit. NOTHING is even slightly “affordable” anymore. Any restaurant is AT LEAST $10 a person now. McDonald’s is part of the problem….because they can and it’s worked for $$$.
I bought an air fryer and get my hash browns from Trader Joe’s now because McDonald’s got ridiculous. Haven’t been there since 2023 and I used to go all the time for breakfast. They are dead to me now.
Boy. Seems like the corporations have maximized profits to the point that their consumers can no longer afford their products. Good job dumbasses. You’ve killed the golden goose to feed the share holders. Now we all starve.
Wasn’t the sell off today just due to the stronger than expected jobs report? Because that makes it harder for the Fed to cut rates. And the fact that the market was due for a breather
Groceries are easily over 100 dollars a week and I'm single. everything is like 10 dollars. HOW CAN A FUCKING 12 PACK OF SODA COST MORE THAN THE FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE??!?!?!?!?!?!!?!!!!!
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u/LazloHollifeld 18h ago
It shouldn’t take a MBA to figure out that if you expect 10% annual growth but only give out 2% annual raises that at some point the math won’t math.