David G. McIntyre/Cal Sport Media via AP Images
Customers wait in line below signage for the Costco Kirkland Signature $1.50 hot dog and soda combo, which has maintained the same price since 1985, at the food court outside a Costco store in San Jose, California, October 15, 2022.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
“We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.” If you’ve spent any significant amount of time on social media in the last few years, you’ve likely come across this catchphrase and/or its accompanying image, known colloquially as the “hot dog guy.” The viral meme originated with a skit from I Think You Should Leave—Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s sketch comedy show—where Robinson, clad in a hot dog costume, attempts to convince a group of people that he definitely wasn’t responsible for driving a hot dog–shaped car into a storefront. Screenshots and gifs of Robinson frantically delivering the line have been all over the internet since the show’s 2019 Netflix debut, and are often invoked in reaction to individuals complaining about problems they’ve directly contributed to.
As public pessimism about the economy continues despite cooling inflation, many in the political media class find themselves having a “hot dog guy” moment, trying to explain this disconnect without implicating themselves. A prime example of this phenomenon is Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell, who late last month attempted to make sense of “why everything Americans think about the economy is wrong.”
In her piece, Rampell cites Harris-Guardian polling data that highlights the divergence between public conceptions of the economy and actual economic metrics. She notes that while unemployment has remained below 4 percent for the longest period of time since the late 1960s, nearly half (49 percent) of respondents believe that the unemployment rate is at a 50-year high. In a similar vein, nearly half (49 percent) of the poll’s respondents believe that stock markets have been down since the beginning of the year, when the opposite is true; the S&P 500 is up more than 12 percent this year after rising 23 percent in 2023.
Rampell then offers explanations for why these misconceptions are present, some more valid than others. She rightly points out that terms like “recession” and “inflation,” which describe very specific conditions for trained economists, are used differently by laypeople. Whereas economists have celebrated a slowing in price growth since mid-2022, the general public—in hoping that costs for everyday goods return to their pre-pandemic levels—are much less likely to acknowledge that inflation has gone down.
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Rampell also engages in some vague criticism about those in the media doing both a “lousy job” of helping the public make sense of the economy (in a manner more in line with trained economists) and “generally giv[ing] more play to bad economic numbers than good ones.” However, this introspection proves rather superficial when she ultimately pins the blame on news consumers for their own ostensible preferences for negative coverage. It only follows then that her solution is to simply urge the public to “reward” positive coverage of the economy with their attention.
What makes Rampell’s sudden concern about public misreadings of the economy so ironic is just how much her own writing has contributed to such distorted views. One simply has to look through her reporting on the 2021-2022 inflationary period to find that she herself has consistently demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the reason for soaring costs.
In fact, referring to her inflation coverage as a “misunderstanding” is quite generous. Rampell has remained an outright opponent of the idea that corporate profits were largely responsible for sustained inflation during the early pandemic period. Sellers’ inflation—which posits “that, in significantly concentrated sectors of the economy, coordinated price hikes can be a significant driver of inflation”—has been routinely disparaged by Rampell as both “lazy populist demagoguing” and a “conspiracy theory.”
Yet, for all her antagonism to sellers’ inflation (in 2022 alone, she published at least eight pieces decrying the notion), Rampell has never once engaged with the argument head-on. Instead she prefers to attack the “greedflation” straw man in an attempt to hand-wave away those to her left as foolish sloganeers who don’t understand basic economics (“Corporations are always out to make a buck. That’s their job,” duh). If corporations always have the motive and the means to raise prices, then what the pandemic provided was what investigators would consider the “opportunity” to take full advantage of consolidated markets.
If Rampell herself remains unwilling to accurately cover the economy, how can she then turn around and blame the public for being misinformed?
The implications of this contradiction bleed into her proposed solution to the problem of low economic literacy. If anyone is responsible for highlighting accurate and insightful economics coverage to combat misinformation, it would be an economics reporter. Yet Rampell has continually refused to engage with the ever-growing body of research vindicating the sellers’ inflation thesis. And not just from left-leaning organizations or heterodox economists, but the likes of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, which has even produced research noting that corporate profits were (and have previously been) substantial contributors to inflation during economic recoveries. If Fed economists aren’t enough, Rampell could simply look around. The European Central Bank, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Bank for International Settlements, European Commission, and more have all published studies blaming corporate profits for driving price surges.
In direct opposition to her supposed “special emphasis on data-driven journalism,” Rampell has never once given any column space to any of the aforementioned research. Likewise, she has ignored recent scandals—like RealPage’s rent-gouging algorithm or Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield’s attempts at gas price-fixing—that provide evidence of increasingly concentrated corporate power unduly raising prices in real time.
With all this in mind, it’s hard not to think of Rampell as the hot dog guy. But if the analogy still seems far-fetched, let me point you to a pro-Costco piece she published a mere five days after the economic misunderstandings piece. In it, Rampell attempted to use the company’s commitment to, well, a $1.50 hot dog as proof that the left’s concerns over big business are overblown.
This is ironic, not just because of the hot dog–related subject matter, but also because Rampell (yet again) ignores inconvenient facts to push forth her narrative. The notion that the retail giant is a “miracle of capitalism” for keeping its food court items cheap looks much less convincing when juxtaposed with the fact that—despite already high profits—Costco continues to hike prices on other goods and is considering doing so for its membership fees. (Indeed, the Costco hot dog is one of the best-known examples of loss-leader products, which lure people in with an amazing price in the hope that they shop around and buy other, undiscounted products.) Funnily enough, Rampell’s piece was published the same day reporters revealed Costco’s plans to sell its customers’ data to build out its ad network. As executive director of Groundwork Collaborative Lindsay Owens quipped, it might be truer to say that the “price of a hot dog [is] $1.50 and your identity.”
Unsurprisingly, neither the price offsets nor the data selling were mentioned in her article.
Public negativity about the economy isn’t totally unfounded. The economy is far more than lines on a graph or data points in a vacuum. As such, the strength of an economy shouldn’t only be based on the criterion of classically trained economists looking backwards. That large swaths of the public feel so pessimistic about their financial security has less to do with their fundamental “wrongness” about how the economy works and more to do with the perception that the economy no longer works for them. Why would Rampell assume the customer and market are always right, but market participants (ordinary Americans) are wrong about the economy?
That being said, commentators like Rampell have continued to report in a manner that exacerbates, rather than alleviates, misconceptions about the economy, especially in regard to who is to blame for high prices. Rather than chastising the public for not intrinsically knowing better, they should re-evaluate their own contributions to the problem.
