Thursday, June 23, 2022

CITY OF MESA'S DATA CENTER HUSTLE...Facebook's Water-Guzzling Data Center + Mesa high-voltage line

Data centers use electricity both to power their servers and also to cool them, since their operations generate lots of heat.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, “data centers are one of the most energy-intensive building types, consuming 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building.”

TOP STORY 

Mesa high-voltage line for Facebook going to hearing        

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2019 Bill Jabjiniak, Mesa’s economic development director, said the boom is no coincidence and represents eight years of planning to lure the high-tech companies and their high-paying jobs to Mesa.

“I would tell you this is a vision that started eight years ago,’’ Jabjiniak said, saying it was back then that he and his colleagues started assembling the infrastructure vital to data centers.
OK What about the water??
 
. . .that's the most precious commodity here in the desert and The East Valley - it's not mentioned, . .Elliott Avenue Technology Corridor" in far southeast Mesa, the location of agriculture, desert, and the former Williams Air Force Base. Now, with abundant concrete, gravel, and asphalt, it will expand the increasingly dangerous Phoenix urban heat island. The "Corridor" is entirely car dependent.

Data centers are lowest on the ladder of the tech economy: necessary, but bringing few jobs — much less high-end jobs — and several headaches. This is why they are usually found in rural areas desperate to replace their lost millwork, manufacturing, or railroad jobs. States and localities shell out huge incentives and disappointment follows. . .

Another problem with Data Center Alley: These massive server farms are water hogs. Elsewhere, they contribute to climate change because of their enormous appetite for electricity. Maybe Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station helps Mesa here. It's only built upwind of the nation's fifth most populous city.

And no evidence has emerged that data centers are a gateway to more advanced tech work. Metro Phoenix got nowhere in its bid for Amazon HQ2.

Read more closely and it's clear that Mesa's "technology corridor" is yet another Arizona real-estate hustle, dependent on cheap farmland and tilt-up buildings, plus a heapin' helping of tax breaks — in a state that ranks second from last in per-student funding. . .

 

INFORMATION FROM EARLIER POSTS ON THIS BLOG

16 August 2021

Facebook Data Center ( Formerly Known as "Project Huckleberry" ) = A LARGE WATER CONSUMER

Let's backtrack to one item on the Mesa City Council agenda 17 May 2021.
 Now we know what that mystery of "a data center" turns out to be as well as the agreement to authorize the development to be a MLM customer ( LARGE WATER CONSUMER )
File #: 21-0552   
Type: Resolution Status: Agenda Ready
In control: City Council
On agenda: 5/17/2021
Title:

Approving and authorizing the City Manager to enter into a Development Agreement and Sustainable Water Service Agreement with Redale LLC, for the development of approximately 396 acres of property generally located at the southeast corner of Elliot and Ellsworth Roads.  The Agreements facilitate the phased development of a large data center that will generate economic benefits to the City of Mesa and authorize the development to be a MLM Customer (large water customer) under Title 8, Chapter 10 of the Mesa City Code. (District 6)                                

Attachments:

1. Council Report,

2. Resolution,

3. Development Agreement,

4. Sustainable Service Agreement

and

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INSERT: From the Non-Profit City of Mesa Newsroom Mesa Now > More High-Voltage Hype on Mesa's Data Center Hustle

So tell me how the City's "new communication strategy" is going when there's no proof that all the salaried media specialists and all the public information officers produce the final product for publication. . . from what we can see they might appear incapacitated, otherwise-engaged, or either not quite ready-willing-or-able to write their own new press releases for public consumption > With the new data center, Facebook is prioritizing sustainable, clean energy as well as local water conservation. Facebook's investment will support 450 megawatts of new, renewable energy projects at three sites in Arizona, ensuring energy for the facility is 100% renewable. In addition, Facebook announced plans to restore over 200 million gallons of water per year in the Colorado River and Salt River basins to restore more water than the data center will consume. The Mesa Data Center will use at least 60% less water than the average data center. . ."
HOW > USING 'WATER OFFSETS' + 'WATER RESTORATION CERTIFICATES'

CSRWire - Bonneville Environmental Foundation

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Re: Bonneville Environmental Foundation BEF

In August 2019, the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association built a 16-foot pyramid of jugs in its main entrance in Phoenix. The goal was to show residents of this desert region how much water they each use a day—120 gallons—and to encourage conservation. 

“We must continue to do our part every day,” executive director Warren Tenney wrote in a blog post. “Some of us are still high-end water users who could look for more ways to use water a bit more wisely.”

A few weeks earlier in nearby Mesa, Google proposed a plan for a giant data center among the cacti and tumbleweeds. The town is a founding member of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, but water conservation took a back seat in  it struck with the largest U.S. internet company.

Google is guaranteed 1 million gallons a day to cool the data center, and up to 4 million gallons a day if it hits project milestones. If that was a pyramid of water jugs, it would tower thousands of feet into Arizona’s cloudless sky.

 

 

“Data centers are expanding, they’re going everywhere. They need to be built in a way that ensures they are not taking critical resources away from water-scarce communities,” said Gary Cook, global climate campaigns director at Stand.earth, an environmental advocacy group.. .

“The race for data centers to keep up with it all is pretty frantic,” said Kevin Kent, chief executive officer of consulting firm Critical Facilities Efficiency Solutions. “They can’t always make the most environmentally best choices.”

 

undefined

10 May 2021

=========================================================================
From KJZZ report today

Mesa Asks Citizens To Conserve Electricity Amid Concerns Over Energy Supply

By Jimmy Jenkins
Published: Wednesday, June 30, 2021 - 6:21pm

Mesa is urging residents to conserve electricity as prices soar and energy reserves are diminishing. 

The city of Mesa operates its own electric utility that serves about 18,000 residential, commercial and light industrial customers in the downtown area.

Frank McRae is the city’s director of the Energy Resources Department. He said the power supply markets are tightening to a point they had projected wouldn’t happen until 2023.

"There’s typically an amount of supply that exceeds demand amongst the utilities and the power providers in the western regional markets," he said. "That margin, or what we call reserve margin, has diminished significantly over the last several years." So as a result, energy prices have spiked.

Mesa is asking customers to conserve energy consumption from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., because energy costs for the city for that time period have increased tenfold over the past year.

 

>

 

 

24 September 2018

09 November 2018

Most people probably didn't notice it, but there's A VERY BIG WHOPPER for power plans and more real estate development here in what's called The Southeast Valley.
Power in the expansion of above-the-ground electric energy lines and powers behind-the-scenes
(the reference is to "other stakeholders" that go un-named).

Make no  mistake about it: these are long-range plans. Last week the Mesa City approved an agreement with City Manager Chris Brady to purchase electric energy from WAPA through the year 2030. WAPA is the Western Area Power Alliance. It just happened to coincide with SRP's press announcement that was published by The Queen Creek Independent on November 8th.
They're all "Linked-Up" in the expansion of The New Zion and Saint's Holdings.

Read what you want into that . . . or you might want to take the heat off the subject by calling it Suburban Sprawl or a network of scattered and connected Boomburgs or fast-growing technology corridors/sectors with major corporations who have been the catalyst for housing, shopping and entertainment that have now become recognizable places-on-the-aerial maps. NOTICE where the lines on the map are going.
(6.5 miles of the new WAPA power lines run through Mesa)
 
 
 
ITY OF MESA STARTS TO REALIZE 1,200-YEAR OLD WATER DROUGHT IS SERIOUS
Intro: The signs were there all these many years - all these many years of 'Build it and They will come' in rampant unchecked and unrestrained relentless unsustainable Suburban Sprawl that has devoured the entire East Valley.
There are, however, no signs that the Mesa City Council or the city government has any plans to stop-and-think about any of the consequences when they have fast-tracked approvals for more thousands of new homes, water-guzzling data centers and industrial parks.
Paying lip-service to the crisis is one thing - taking responsible action is another

1

Mesa Statement Following Arizona Department of Water Resources and Central Arizona Project Joint Colorado River Shortage Briefing

 May 6, 2022 at 11:48 am
Due to historic drought, climate change and over-allocation, conditions on the Colorado River are worsening. While deeper shortages may come quicker than anticipated, Mesa recognizes the situation is serious and continues to strategically plan for a...
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PowerShell

Security

NSA shares tips on securing Windows devices with PowerShell

The National Security Agency (NSA) and cybersecurity partner agencies issued an advisory today recommending system administrators to use PowerShell to prevent and detect malicious activity on Windows machines.

______________________________________________________________________________

TODAY

CISA: Log4Shell exploits still being used to hack VMware servers

CISA

By
  • June 23, 2022
  • 03:28 PM

CISA warned today that threat actors, including state-backed hacking groups, are still targeting VMware Horizon and Unified Access Gateway (UAG) servers using the Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) remote code execution vulnerability.

Attackers can exploit Log4Shell remotely on vulnerable servers exposed to local or Internet access to move laterally across networks until they gain access to internal systems containing sensitive data.

After its disclosure in December 2021, multiple threat actors began scanning for and exploiting unpatched systems, including state-backed hacking groups from China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey, as well as several access brokers commonly used by ransomware gangs.

Today, in a joint advisory with the US Coast Guard Cyber Command (CGCYBER), the cybersecurity agency said that servers have been compromised using Log4Shell exploits to gain initial access into targeted organizations' networks.

After breaching the networks, they deployed various malware strains providing them with the remote access needed to deploy additional payloads and exfiltrate hundreds of gigabytes of sensitive information.

"As part of this exploitation, suspected APT actors implanted loader malware on compromised systems with embedded executables enabling remote command and control (C2)," the advisory revealed.

"In one confirmed compromise, these APT actors were able to move laterally inside the network, gain access to a disaster recovery network, and collect and exfiltrate sensitive data."

Unpatched VMware systems should be considered compromised

Organizations that haven't yet patched their VMware servers are advised to tag them as hacked and start incident response (IR) procedures.

The steps required for proper response in such a situation include the immediate isolation of potentially affected systems, collection and review of relevant logs and artifacts, hiring third-party IR experts (if needed), and reporting the incident to CISA.

"CISA and CGCYBER recommend all organizations with affected systems that did not immediately apply available patches or workarounds to assume compromise and initiate threat hunting activities using the IOCs provided in this CSA, Malware Analysis Report (MAR)-10382580-1, and MAR-10382254-1," the two agencies said.

"If potential compromise is detected, administrators should apply the incident response recommendations included in this CSA and report key findings to CISA."

Today's advisory comes after VMware has also urged customers in January to secure Internet-exposed VMware Horizon servers against ongoing Log4Shell attacks.

Since the start of the year, VMware Horizon servers have been targeted by Chinese-speaking threat actors to deploy Night Sky ransomware, the Lazarus North Korean APT to deploy information stealers, and the TunnelVision Iranian-aligned hacking group to deploy backdoors.

Until you can install patched builds by updating all affected VMware Horizon and UAG servers to the latest versions, you can reduce the attack surface "by hosting essential services on a segregated demilitarized (DMZ) zone," deploying web application firewalls (WAFs), and "ensuring strict network perimeter access controls."

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    NEW ESCALATIONS IN NATO: These developments bring the world closer to a conflagration that could dwarf the ongoing war in Ukraine and endanger the future of humankind.

    Along with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that circumvented yet again the UNSC, and NATO’s subsequent enlargement in 2004 to seven more East European countries, including the three Baltic states, which were formerly part of the USSR, this sequence of events was decisive in creating the animosity between Russia and the West that was a prelude to the invasion of Ukraine. . .The huge and ever-growing amounts that are spent on armament and destruction would be wisely reallocated to the only wars that are truly in humanity’s interest: the wars against poverty and climate change

  • World
  • Foreign Policy
  • Military-industrial complex

    • NATO From Bad to Worse

    It is urgent to rebuild a global peace movement opposed to all military alliances and the ongoing massive increases in defense budgets.

    By Gilbert Achcar

    Today 5:00 am

    <div class=__reading__mode__extracted__imagecaption>Representatives are seen during the meeting of NATO Ministers of Defense in NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, June 16, 2022. (Zheng Huansong / Xinhua via Getty Images)

    [ Representatives are seen during the meeting of NATO Ministers of Defense in NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, June 16, 2022. (Zheng Huansong / Xinhua ]

    ". . .The forthcoming Madrid summit is going to directly involve NATO in open hostility to China, far beyond the alliance’s original area of relevance. This area is defined in the 1949 treaty constitutive of NATO as comprising “the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France, on the territory of or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.” NATO’s post-1991 mutation led it to intervene beyond its members’ territory—first in the Balkans, then much further from its original area, in Afghanistan, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

    > At  the end of June, for the second time since the Spanish state joined NATO in 1982, the Atlantic Alliance will hold a summit meeting in Madrid. It so happens that each of these two Madrid summits constitutes a major defining moment in the history of the organization.

    The previous summit held in 1997 was the culmination of a long debate among NATO member governments about the alliance’s eastward enlargement. The debate became public and heated in the United States, involving almost all the country’s foreign policy establishment. It pitted those who warned against ostracizing Russia—which in their view was how any expansion of NATO to countries that were previously subordinate to Moscow would inevitably be perceived by the Russians—against those who were eager to seize the opportunity offered by what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer had called in 1990 “the unipolar moment,” in order to extend US hegemony to areas that were formerly part of the Soviet sphere.

    The latter position was shared by most of the Clinton administration, inspired from behind the scenes by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The opposite stance was represented within the administration by Defense Secretary William Perry during Bill Clinton’s first mandate. Perry was ousted from the administration and very tellingly replaced by the Republican William Cohen for Clinton’s second term, the year when the Madrid summit was held.

    Supporters of NATO’s eastward expansion wanted the US empire to encompass a large chunk of the former Soviet empire in the belief that, sooner or later, post-communist Russia would seek to revive its long imperial tradition. It was therefore necessary to preempt this inevitable development by securing US control of as much of the former Soviet empire as possible. Since Putin’s regime has indeed engaged in predatory behavior since 2008 in what has traditionally been regarded by Russia as its imperial “near abroad”—intervention in Georgia in 2008, annexation of Crimea and intervention in Donbas in 2014, attempted invasion for “regime change” in Ukraine in 2022, and ongoing efforts to occupy the whole of Donbas and adjacent areas—one would be tempted to believe that those who advocated NATO’s enlargement have been proven right.

    The truth is, however, that this outcome is precisely what those who opposed the enlargement had cautioned against. They rightly predicted that the Russians would see NATO’s eastward expansion as a hostile gesture and that it would therefore breed revanchist attitudes among them. In other words, they warned that enlarging NATO in preemption of Russia’s return to imperial behavior would actually act as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    The 1997 summit officially invited Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic to join the alliance. The three Eastern European countries’ accession was completed two years later at the Washington summit that celebrated NATO’s 50th anniversary. It happened at a time when the alliance was bombing Yugoslavia in contravention of international law, in the first post-1990 US-led war not authorized by the United Nations Security Council.

    Along with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that circumvented yet again the UNSC, and NATO’s subsequent enlargement in 2004 to seven more East European countries, including the three Baltic states, which were formerly part of the USSR, this sequence of events was decisive in creating the animosity between Russia and the West that was a prelude to the invasion of Ukraine.
    But the most dangerous novelty at the Madrid summit consists of a major qualitative extension of NATO’s purpose. Originally founded as a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union and its subordinate states, NATO has mutated after 1991 into a “security organization”—meaning that it has been involved in military actions (NATO as such did not formally engage in any war in the USSR’s days)—and redefined its purpose in ostracizing post-Soviet Russia by expanding toward its borders. The NATO-Russia Council created in 1997 was a meager consolation given to Moscow in lieu of inviting it to join the alliance. Nobody was fooled. From tacit, NATO’s hostility to Russia became explicit after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
    The forthcoming Madrid summit is going to directly involve NATO in open hostility to China, far beyond the alliance’s original area of relevance. This area is defined in the 1949 treaty constitutive of NATO as comprising “the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France, on the territory of or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.” NATO’s post-1991 mutation led it to intervene beyond its members’ territory—first in the Balkans, then much further from its original area, in Afghanistan, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
    Participation in the organization’s meetings has nevertheless remained restricted to Europe and North America. No longer. Japan, along with Australia, New Zealand and South Korea have been invited to attend the Madrid summit as NATO “partners” in the Asia-Pacific region—a very serious provocation to Beijing. It can only interpret this invitation as a step toward the consolidation of US-led alliances in a single global network opposed to both Russia and China. After the preliminary meeting of NATO’s defense ministers held on June 16, the organization’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, declared that the new NATO Strategic Concept that will be adopted at the Madrid summit will set out the alliance’s position “on Russia, on emerging challenges, and for the first time, on China.”

    . . .  From the perspective of Europe and the Asia Pacific, acquiescing to this de facto extension of NATO’s role is equivalent to being herded like Panurge’s sheep toward throwing themselves into the sea. Antagonizing China is not in Europe’s interest, nor is it in the interest of any of the states invited to the Madrid summit. Even if the European governments believed that Russia has now irreversibly become a threat to their security, it would be utterly counterproductive for them to push Beijing toward consolidating an alliance with Moscow.

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    Gilbert AchcarGilbert Achcar is a professor at SOAS, University of London. His new book, The New Cold War: The United States, Russia and China from Kosovo to Ukraine, will come out in early 2023.

     

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    ARIZONA SPEAKER OF THE STATE HOUSE RUSTY BOWERS: In the end he would still bow-down to Trump "for all the good he has done"

    That's how the conscience of Mesa Conservative Republican works with scripted double-talk out of both sides of his mouth.
    In May 2022, Bowers was one of five recipients of the John F Kennedy Profile in Courage award. But on Monday, he said he would still vote for Trump.

    ‘I’d vote for him again’: Bowers backs Trump despite denouncing ‘big lie’

    <div class=__reading__mode__extracted__imagecaption>Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker, testified that the effects of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election were ‘horrendous’.Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA<br>Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker, testified that the effects of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election were ‘horrendous’.Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA</div>

    [Image credit: Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker, testified that the effects of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election were ‘horrendous’.Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA]
     
    Martin Pengelly
    the Guardian

    "Arizona Republican’s comments come after January 6 hearing testimony that the effects of Trump’s actions were ‘horrendous’

    Rusty Bowers, the Arizona Republican House speaker who made national headlines describing his refusal to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election, has said he will vote for Trump again if he runs for president in 2024.“If he is the nominee, if he was up against [Joe] Biden, I’d vote for him again,” Bowers told the Associated Press. “Simply because what he did the first time, before Covid, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.”

    The statement, made on Monday, read jarringly in light of testimony Bowers delivered before the January 6 committee in Washington on Tuesday.

    But it echoed comments from other Republicans, the former attorney general William Barr prominent among them, who have said they will still support Trump even after denouncing his attempt to subvert US democracy in service of his lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Biden.

    Bowers told the AP: “I supported him, I walked for him, I campaigned with him. But I wouldn’t do anything illegal for him.”

    He said the effects of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, including the deadly US Capitol attack, were “horrendous”, adding: “The result of throwing the pebble in the pond – the reverberations across the pond, have, I think, been very destructive.”

    He also said he did not share many Republicans’ opposition to the January 6 hearings, which he said were “illuminat[ing] something we need to see big time … and I hope it would sober us”.

    On Tuesday, shortly before Bowers testified, Trump issued a statement in which he abused the Arizonan and claimed: “You told me the election was rigged and that I won Arizona.”

    Bowers testified that he did speak to Trump after the election, but if “anyone, anytime has said that I said the election was rigged, that would not be true”.

    Asked if he told Trump he won Arizona, Bowers said: “That is also false.”

    He described pressure from Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies and the toll it took.

    Reading from a journal he kept at the time, he said: “It is painful to have friends who have been such a help to me turn on me with such rancor. . .“I may, in the eyes of men, not hold correct opinions or act according to their vision or convictions but I … do not want to win by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to with any contrived desertion or deflection of my deep foundational desire to follow God’s will.”

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    REAL-TIME PRICE TESTING: Experimeting with price fluctuations to determine how high they can go before turning off customers and losing sales.

    Hmmm.Have shoppers rebelled? No. [ and so there's more material for one post! ]         
    ...When he began noticing last summer that prices were going up and consumers didn’t seem to mind, he wondered if there was something wrong with the data or the company’s algorithms. . .More consumer products companies and retailers are testing how customers respond to price increases in real time — with the results often giving them the green light to go higher

    What’s The Highest Price You’d Pay For That 12-Pack? Retailers Are Finding Out In Real Time.

    A Stock Market Bubble? It&#39;s More Like a Fire - WSJ

    Lauren Debter

    Forbes Staff, the retail industry.

    Forbes | 2022-06-23

    More consumer products companies and retailers are testing how customers respond to price increases in real time — with the results often giving them the green light to go higher.

    "Say a soda manufacturer is facing a steep rise in costs. Say the company wants to raise the price of a 12-pack to recoup those costs, but without putting a dent in sales. Rather than doing a Hail Mary, it tests a few different price points. In a couple of stores, the price goes up by ten cents. Elsewhere it goes up by a quarter. Maybe it lowers the price in a few stores, too.

    Then it waits to see what happens. If demand remains little changed at the highest price point, it may decide to roll that new price across thousands of stores.

    Welcome to the world of real-time price testing. Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay, Hershey, Neutrogena, Walgreens and JCPenney are among the consumer products companies and retailers that are experimenting with price fluctuations to determine how high they can go before turning off customers and losing sales.

    “Everything is a test all the time,” said David Moran, cofounder and chairman of Eversight Labs, which provides the pricing technology.

    While companies have always been able to run small tests before rolling out price changes, advancements in technology now allow them to run tests in a handful of locations and then optimize prices for each item in their product portfolio across thousands of stores.

    That type of real-time data comes in handy at a time when consumer behavior has become so difficult to predict, amid a global pandemic and inflation at 40-year highs. Typically, companies look at how customers have responded to price increases in the past and try to infer how they’ll respond in the future. They want to be careful not to raise prices so sharply that sales nosedive. However, data from years past might as well be thrown out the window these days.

    “Historical data is irrelevant right now,” said Farla Efros, managing director of HRC Retail Advisory at Accenture.

    According to historical data, consumers should have reacted more negatively to price increases. However, the consumer products companies that make snacks, drinks, cleaning supplies and other household staples have been saying that consumers have largely been more accepting of price increases than they expected. Last month, Procter & Gamble said elasticities — which measure how much demand for a product falls when prices go up — were still 20% to 30% better than historical data suggested.

    “Despite all the jawboning that consumer demand is softening or consumers are going to snap back, we’re not seeing that in the data,” said Moran. “It’s a bit of a puzzler.” . .

    READ MORE >> whats-the-highest-price-youd-pay-for-that-12-pack-retailers-are-finding-out-in-real-time

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    20 February 2022

    'ELASTICITY' + INFLATION: American Consumers by and large know there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it

    Have shoppers rebelled? No.    
    Inflation, at a 40-year high, has yet to stir Americans to switch to cheaper brands or quit spending in any significant way so as to cause concern in corporate boardrooms.
    American consumers seem to have passed through the other stages of grief, which include anger and denial, and have settled on acceptance–in higher numbers than anybody expected, including executives behind the nation’s biggest household brands.
    There’s even an economic term for this phenomenon: elasticity, which captures how much demand for a product falls when prices go up.
     

    Americans’ Response To Inflation Is Not What Many Expected

    Shoppers have been patient, but will be tested by more price increases coming this year

    Lauren Debter Forbes Staff Retail
    Forbes | 2022-02-17 
     
    ". . .As Beth Ann Bovino, the chief U.S. economist at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, pointed out, it’s not that shoppers are happy with higher prices. It’s that they’ve accepted the situation. Consumer sentiment has fallen to the lowest level in a decade, “and that’s largely the sticker shock at stores,” she said. . .

    > Shoppers have been hearing about inflation and supply chain for months, which may temper their surprise when they see higher prices at the store.

    <div class=__reading__mode__extracted__imagecaption>Daily Cover|Feb 17, 2022,06:30am EST|Americans’ Response To Inflation Is Not What Many Expected

    “I think it’s been hammered into the consumer so hard that it’s almost an expectation,” said White, the Kansas grocer. 

    When it comes to raising prices, it helps to have company, said Noel Wallace, CEO of Colgate-Palmolive, which makes Colgate toothpaste and Speed Stick deodorant. “You’re not seeing one competitor move. You’re seeing the category move,” Wallace said. “We’re particularly pleased with . . . the acceptance of the pricing across North America.” 

    > That puts the North American shopper at odds with consumers in developing countries, and even Europe, where companies said they face more resistance when raising prices. . .

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    THERE HAS BEEN LITTLE RELIEF FROM INFLATION...May’s food-at-home index jumped even higher, up 11.9% year over year and marking the largest gain since the 12 months through April 1979

    Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the May Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 1% month to month (seasonally adjusted) and 8.6% year over year, the highest 12-month increase thus far in 2022.
    May’s food-at-home index jumped even higher, up 11.9% year over year and marking the largest gain since the 12 months through April 1979, according to BLS.
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    The month-over-month rise in the food-at-home index continues to be steep in 2022, up 1.4% in May after increases of 0.9% in April, 1.5% in March, 1.4% in February and 1% in January.
    “Retail sales are reflecting Americans’ growing concern about inflation and its impact on the cost of everything from groceries to gas,” according to NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay. “Retailers are doing what they can to keep prices down, but we continue our call on the administration to repeal unnecessary and costly tariffs on goods from China to relieve pressure on American consumers and their family budgets.”

    Grocery Store Sales Stay on the Rise in May

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