A flower bouquet reveals the rocketing costs of....everything.

That is indeed how inflation works, yes.

And a sitting president of the United States has very little control over inflation.

Roses really smell like poo poo

Instead of article about a florist bellyaching about his rising costs, I'd much rather read an article by the NYT's crack team of investigative journalists concerning the phenomenon of corporate greed during inflationary times and how one feeds the other.

Corporatists learned a long time ago to never let a crisis go to waste. They admitted as much. I'll say it again: the president of Tyson Foods said that their costs haven't risen significantly, profits were up, but they saw the opportunity to raise prices/profits, so they did.

If we held corporations to account, they would not do this. But we put corporations on the untouchable pedestal and then get pissed off when they do exactly what you'd expect them to do when there's no one minding the store.

But get upset and complain endlessly about crime, inflation and crumbling society. You make your corporate overlords very happy.

But it's just 𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚.

Trust me.

A lot of florists are closing because they are aging and retiring. It’s a hard, physical job spent continuously on your feet and in cold, damp conditions. It’s a job that requires a certain amount of talent but even then the pay, except in rare instances, is only slightly higher than what you’d make working in retail or in fast-casual food service. Not a job for someone over fifty and not a job young people are gravitating towards.

The internet also has really changed how flowers are ordered and given. Twenty years ago, lots of grocery stores didn’t have flower departments and the now ubiquitous buckets of $10 a dozen roses weren’t in every store. Flowers the were given less often but in the form of nicer, arranged bouquets from florists.

Even when ordering flowers in distant cities people called a florist in their own town, who then sent the order through an electronic system such as FTD or Teleflora to a partner florist. The florist who originated the order got a fee. Now, people go online to a national florist website or look up a florist in the destination city and order directly. These consortiums also advertised on behalf of their constituent florists and that has all but disappeared.

The third big change is the fact that Americans have become steadily less religious over time and are having fewer big church functions like weddings and funerals, and at least for funerals it has become the norm to request donations to a charity in lieu of flowers when they do have a service.