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The story
A survey of 195 major food manufacturers conducted by Teikoku Databank found that 66% of companies cited “labor costs” as a reason for raising prices — the first time this figure has topped 60% since the survey began. Unlike the pattern seen until now, where price hikes were driven mainly by rising raw material and energy costs, this result shows that rising labor costs themselves are now being passed directly into prices. In the wake of this report, a 5ch thread saw clashes between posters who said they “don’t feel their pay has actually gone up” and others countering with data showing real wage increases, with the discussion spreading further into debates over the timing of the consumption tax cut and the role of immigrant labor.
As inflation (rising prices) drags on, the reasons companies give for raising prices have been shifting.
According to a Teikoku Databank survey of major food manufacturers, the number of companies citing “labor costs” as a reason for price hikes has surged, topping 60% for the first time this year.
In Japan, raising prices specifically because of labor costs has long been difficult to pull off.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Can't afford it anymore — guess I'll just go bald.
Just smear some salad oil on your head and fake it!
Shaving cream's basically doubled in price too.
Step one has to be destroying the media outlets that never criticized opportunistic hikes when the consumption tax went UP.
At any "normal" company, wages have been climbing like crazy the past few years.
What are you even saying — this is 5ch, where over 90% of posters claim to already be FIRE'd (retired early) on ¥100 million+ a year.
This is just going to make price hikes accelerate even more.
Exactly this.
It would've been fine if the opposition parties had just accepted cash handouts instead of insisting on a tax cut.
To raise someone's pay, you have to lower someone else's.
Make immigrants work for minimum wage, and funnel the savings into raises for full-time (Japanese) employees.
Yeah, that's right.
That's the norm everywhere else — capitalism is fundamentally built around mild inflation.
It was actually abnormal that prices didn't move for 30 years.
If anything, disposable income feels like it's gone down.
Structurally, prices rise first, so that's to be expected.
Under cost-push inflation, unless you're in a growth industry, your pay won't catch up even doing the exact same job.
Basically it means: go switch to a job somewhere that's actually making money.
Young hires have it good now.
At my company, starting pay is ¥50,000 higher than when I joined.
Few elderly customers can actually use self-checkout, so even with it installed, stores still can't cut staff.
Totally fine with price hikes.
Totally fine with tax hikes too.
But some stingy types are hoarding money that should be flowing down to everyone else, siphoning it off for themselves instead — so overall in Japan,
the economy isn't growing, consumption isn't rising, and the whole thing just keeps shrinking.
There are plenty of idiots out there saying "we don't need immigrants, just raise wages and people will show up" —
but this is literally what raising wages looks like in practice.
If you pay ¥500 for something you used to buy for ¥100, sure, the frontline workers' wages go up.
Exactly. The "just raise the minimum wage" crowd with their fancy degrees — so dumb it's unreal.
A country where not a single person has figured out yet that what actually matters is cutting losses.
For the past 30 years
labor costs weren't raised at all,
so of course this is happening now.
If labor costs had been raised steadily for 30 years,
the average Japanese salary would be ¥20 million by now.
I've never once heard of anyone's pay actually going up.
Look at reality.
Price increase since the turn of the century:
• 2000: 97.29
• 2026: 114.44
• Cumulative increase: about 17.63% (using 2000 as the baseline, prices have risen roughly 1.18x)
Wage increase (minimum hourly wage):
FY2026 (Reiwa 8): ¥1,280 (+¥54)
1998 (Heisei 10): ¥692
An 84% increase
That's an average though.
It's skewed by the top 20% of big corporations.
If that were true, then service industries — where labor costs are a bigger share of the business — should be seeing even more inflation.
At the end of the day, services have the nature of being "things you don't actually have to use."
Because of that, businesses are extremely cautious — basically timid — about raising prices, out of fear of losing customers.
As a result, prices don't rise, margins keep deteriorating, and bankruptcies increase.
Sorry to disappoint, all you strong-yen true believers.
Well, excessive yen weakness should be corrected, but once the yen strengthens, the economy starts stalling and wage cuts and layoffs kick in —
I'll be curious to see if you're still screaming "it's the weak yen's fault!!" when that happens.
I'd take a pay cut any day — deflation is obviously better.
It's also easy cover for opportunistic hikes.
Sure, if that were actually true.
But in reality it's probably just widening inequality.
It's a price cartel.
We're already cooked.
Because the people being employed have no leverage.
Those without power have no choice but to go along with it.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Teikoku Databank runs this price-revision survey of food manufacturers every year, and the share of companies citing “labor costs” as a reason for price hikes has been climbing steadily over the past several years. In Japan, there’s a long-standing practice of companies absorbing labor-shortage-driven cost increases internally rather than passing them on in prices, and the 66% figure shows that practice is now breaking down. The thread split between posters pointing out that wages are statistically rising and others saying that, on the ground, they don’t feel their pay has gone up at all — with some countering that the averages are skewed by a handful of large corporations. There was also a view floated that the timing of the consumption tax cut is being used as a pretext for the price hikes, but that’s speculation separate from the survey results themselves, and should be read as distinct from the actual Teikoku Databank findings the article is based on.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “[Rising Prices] Food Price Hikes Citing “Labor Costs” Surge to 66% — Survey of 195 Major Food Manufacturers“.
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