23% of major Japanese firms may raise prices next year: survey

We’ll go ahead, 50% is ok too. I can’t even remember when I last time or if ever bought from Toyota, Nintendo, Shiseido or Daio Paper. Anyway they should use quite a part of the price increase also for raising wages of their employees and payments for other people they have business relationship with.

Wages won’t rise but prices will go up as the suicide rate will too..,

When machines and subsistence slaves can provide for the rich masters the majority of humans will be surplus to requirements.

A worst case scenario but Marx pointed toward a different future:

https://amp.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/18/fully-automated-luxury-communism-robots-employment

Yes, JeffLee, but the contradiction applies only to the consumer phase of capitalism. When machines and subsistence slaves can provide for the rich masters the majority of humans will be surplus to requirements.

Since most of corporate Japan's customers are also their employees, they will have to give wage rises to their employees so they can keep buying their stuff. If only Karl Marx were alive today to witness his theory on the contradiction of capitalism play out in real life. LOL.

The survey results were released as consumer prices in November in Tokyo gained 3.6 percent from a year earlier, marking the steepest rise since 1982 amid higher energy and food prices that increasingly squeeze household budgets, according to government data released Friday.

I thought the 29 trillion yen economic stimulus with subsidies to export oriented firms to counter inflation and encourage wage hikes is already gone and forgotten?

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20221028/p2g/00m/0bu/020000c

These titanic corporate welfare packages have a way of falling into a black hole and the inflation and misery is still passed on to the consumer as if the stimulus from the public treasury never existed.....

There are kleptocracies in East Africa more accountable.

Of course, many companies will raise their prices in unison through their industry associations, the quasi-cartels they belong to.

This wouldn’t even be a story in most countries, the percentage increase and impact on inflation might but the fact of firms looking to increase prices at a time of increased costs wouldn’t. Japan has experienced an anomalous period of deflation or at best zero inflation since the economy imploded. This has become seen as the norm, especially for those who have grown up knowing nothing else, but it is not and now as the anomaly disappears the population is finding it hard to adjust its thinking, including corporate executives, political policy makers and the BOJ.

Inevitably there will be pressure to to raise wages but as the Japanese workforce is neither unionised to any great degree nor historically militant it is unlikely the pressure will have much effect in the near term but may lead to a change in attitudes as firms knee jerk resist raising wages, a foolish reaction. Firms need to see the advantages of treating their most valuable resource as stakeholders in the overall enterprise and sharing some of the benefits with them thus maintaining their quiescent labour force.

Cant wait for them to all start lowering prices when the cost of importing materials is lower and the yen is stronger . . . Oh wait, that will never ever happen

I remember after the 2008 ＧＦＣ when the US went in hyper quantitive easing and the $ crashed to around 80yen / $ did Japananese firms drop prices then , nope

The central and local governments employees will get their usual fat bonuses this year, and they will if not already get wage increases, manufacturers are making record profits, the private sector employees are working longer hours and harder than ever some lost their jobs due to COVID and the Government still encouraging talking about Encouraging employers to raise wages which they will NOT unless forced to.

It is done BACKWARDS, first raise wages then raise prices so people can pay for the increase.

Raise prices, but not wages?

That's a pay cut.

Unionise.

Yep! They’ll raise prices but not salaries pushing further down the rabbit hole.

Cant wait for them to all start lowering prices when the cost of importing materials is lower and the yen is stronger . . . Oh wait, that will never ever happen

If they are saying they are "thinking about it" or "mulling it over" it means they have already decided to do it and just want to gauge the blowback before doing so. They keep blaming it on the war in Ukraine and what not, but it is simply greed. As one poster put above, gas prices have dropped, and products that increased in price "due to the increase in the cost of gas and therefore shipping" have not gone down, have they?

And so we continue our quickening slide into the third world here in Japan.

The situation has changed quite a bit recently. The JPY is up 8 % since its bottom at 152. Shipping prices are back to their pre covid level and oil price is down 38 % from its peak in June. It means that if companies increase their prices now, it is probably to increase their margin because they feel they can, not to absorb higher costs. Companies have been worried to increase their prices until this year because nobody was doing it. Now that most of them started to do it, companies do not feel restrained anymore and it could be an open door for much higher inflation.

Japanese tendency to follow other was probably one was probably the main cause of very low inflation in the past and may become the cause of much higher inflation in from now on.

23% of major Japanese firms may raise prices next year: survey

What customer will do? Simple just find the cheapest item, ordered online if necessary. Some even might skip to buy, since many item is not the really necessary to buy.

But hey, BOJ head Kuroda just told us that inflation will go down again soon, so he will not raise interest rates! What planet is this old foggy living on. Prices are just going to continue to rise, but unfortunately salaries won't and this will in turn lead to people spending less and the economy contracting. Just what Kuroda said he is trying to prevent, but in fact he is causing it!