Editor’s Note: Epic Economist does a fine job of disseminating financial news and analysis, but they lean centrist political and always avoid mentioning areas of Cultural Marxism that contribute to the downfall of companies. In this case, it’s crystal clear to our readers that one of the biggest reasons for Target’s recent woes is that they went full-groomer over the summer with LGBTQIA+ Supremacy merchandise pushed aggressively during “Pride Month.” So know that just because the elephant in the room isn’t mentioned in the video, it’s well known by our audience as a root cause of Target’s demise. Here’s Epic Economist…
Target’s products are going to get more expensive this fall. The company’s CEO is warning about tougher conditions for shoppers and also raising the alarm about the state of the U.S. economy. The retailer is one of the biggest general merchandise companies in America, and its household goods, groceries, and clothing are about to face some of the steepest price increases since 2019.
If you are a frequent shopper at other retail giants, you probably have noticed that Target’s prices are already notably higher. Even after offering deep discounts to get rid of inventory in 2022 and bearing a 90% profit drop, the company still had to pass higher supply chain costs to shoppers over the past year. And now, it is trying to stabilize its balance sheet by introducing significant price markups on thousands of products.
The Minneapolis retailer’s chief executive officer has issued a dire warning to U.S. consumers for the second half of the year. Brian Cornell said he expects rising interest rates, which makes credit cards more expensive to use, and higher prices on food and energy to continue to put a strain on shoppers.
The big-box store chain missed sales expectations in the second quarter, and according to its latest earnings report, revenue also came lower than expected. Executives pointed to a growing economic malaise, and uncertainty from the restart of student loan repayments as some of the reasons for the deteriorating outlook for the months ahead. Despite falling sales volumes and a tighter environment for consumer spending, Target says it will have to continue hiking prices to improve profitability and meet its financial goals.
Fiddelke noted that price increases are “always the last lever” the retailer pulls, but “external conditions led us to raise prices across a broad set of items in multiple categories,” he added.
Other retailers are doing the same. Home Depot, the nation’s largest home improvement retailer, reported declining sales in its second-quarter earnings results. The company noted that it’s seeing weak sales volumes in several big-ticket items like patio furniture and appliances. For that reason, it has decided to raise the price of smaller home-improvement items to offset its losses.
At this point, Target is considered as one of the highest-priced retailers of 2023. A Business Insider comparison between Target and other major retailers found that Target’s prices are on average 15% to 25% higher than some of its competitors. With consumers having to cover for the company’s financial losses via higher prices, it’s understandable why Wall Street isn’t seeing a bright future for the retailer in the months ahead.
- Hand-curated links from conservative and Christian sites — NO legacy media garbage links. Patriots get their news every day at JDRucker.com
Americans are sick and tired of price increases, and they are likely to search for better deals at other stores instead of going to Target. Even though the markups may help Target to boost revenue in the short term, it will hurt consumer confidence, and ultimately, do more harm than good to its bottom line in the long run. At a time when big retailers are facing a heightened risk of bankruptcy, Target should be actively considering better strategies to bolster its performance and avoid experiencing even more hardships in the future.
Video and article via Epic Economist.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Part of it is globalism, relying on cheap labor in China and Mexico has resulted in equally cheap and unreliable quality goods that end up in landfills soon later. It used to be better to buy old items at thrift stores, because they lasted so long. But now even the thrift stores are full of cheap crap people donated when they downsized recently. I hope voters are happy the Bidens, Clintons, Obamas and Pelosi families became multimillionaires while shipping your jobs overseas. 👹🤡🤬🍦🍦🍦🍦D
Don’t buy there, don’t care.
Die Target die. I won’t be satisfied until they are bankrupt.