American Consumers are Miserable — Here’s Why?

By Prattiba JaiSri On Sep 13, 2021

It’s no secret that the coronavirus pandemic has hit the world in a way that makes even the greatest nations stand back up like they used to.

With consumers essentially being the backbone of the American economy, they are of utmost importance to stable economic recovery. Right now, there are three things that make an American consumer’s life very difficult.

Inflation

The price of almost everything consumers spend their money on is steadily rising. Gas, food, telecommunication costs, and so much more.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations, the expectation is that the inflation rate will be up to 4% one year from now — a new high for one-year-ahead inflation expectations — and at 3.6% three years from now, the highest level since August 2013.

The New York Federal Bank also expected household income and spending to increase, particularly among households with an annual income of more than $100,000.

Although it is projected that stocks and mutual funds would be necessary to beat inflation, these take more risks and a lot of low-income Americans cannot afford to take that risk.

Labor Shortages

America is also seeing a shortage of labor. Low pay and toxic workplaces are driving workers away from their workplaces, especially when hospitalization may be expected by many families and medication due to symptoms from COVID-19 is considered a priority.

But according to Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California-Berkeley and president of One Fair Wage, an advocacy group pushing to raise the subminimum wage for tipped workers, “This is not a worker shortage, this is a wage shortage.”

“The restaurant business, inherently and pre-covid, was a toxic workplace. You had an enormous wage gap between the back of the house and front of the house; rampant alcohol and drug problems; harassment issues; you’ve got people living in or near poverty working hourly jobs with no guarantees.

When the industry collapsed, the pandemic merely amplified the pre-existing conditions.

How many times are you going to go back to something that hurts you?” he said.

The Coronavirus Pandemic

The current tally for the COVID-19 cases in the United States is now 41,506,376 with 670,215, making the region still the epicenter of the pandemic.

The highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus constitutes more than 90% of the cases. Hospitals are filling up, health workers are quitting, and cases continue to rise in every state.

With Democrat and Republican lawmakers not agreeing on vaccination and mask mandates, and many countries from around the world are dealing with their own cases too, the pandemic might as well take a miracle to stop.