It has been a challenging year for most as costs are rising and inflation is becoming real. Last summer economists created a new term “transitory inflation” promising that it was a short term issue and all would settle down as supply chain issues were resolved. Well, that was wrong as inflation continued to rise and a year later, we peaked ay 9% inflation year over year in April.
Over the past 6-7 years most of our costs have remained relatively stable except for labor. Labor is our greatest cost, driving our overall costs to rise faster than base inflation rate as we work to attract and retain our great team. This year with our many of our next highest costs (fuel, fertilizer, and equipment) have risen significantly faster than the base inflation rate. Continued record low unemployment is keeping labor costs rising still.
Fuel costs up but we haven’t considered fuel surcharges
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