"Every retailer, when they price their goods, looks at their total cost overall. When they have costs go up, they'll price their products accordingly"
About this Quote
A working actor delivering a plain-vanilla lesson in pricing is its own kind of cultural tell. Dan Butler's line reads less like a hot take than the kind of calm, commonsense script you reach for when you want an audience to stop arguing about villains and start accepting a mechanism: costs rise, prices follow. It's not meant to be poetic. It's meant to be disarming.
The intent is stabilizing. By centering "every retailer" and "total cost overall", Butler nudges the listener away from moral language (greed, exploitation, price gouging) toward managerial language (inputs, margins, pass-through). The repetition - "costs" twice in two sentences - functions like a metronome: steady, inevitable, impersonal. The subtext is an appeal to inevitability, which is persuasive precisely because it feels non-ideological. If this is just how pricing works, then anger is misdirected and policy intervention starts to sound naive, even meddlesome.
Context matters here because actors often speak in public as vessels for broader narratives - not as economists, but as amplifiers of a vibe. In an inflationary moment, this is the rhetorical move of the reasonable adult at the table, smoothing panic into acceptance. The line offers a kind of emotional service: it reassures consumers that price hikes aren't a conspiracy, while quietly normalizing that the consumer will, in fact, eat the increase.
It's a soft defense of the status quo dressed up as a basic fact, and that plainness is the power play.
The intent is stabilizing. By centering "every retailer" and "total cost overall", Butler nudges the listener away from moral language (greed, exploitation, price gouging) toward managerial language (inputs, margins, pass-through). The repetition - "costs" twice in two sentences - functions like a metronome: steady, inevitable, impersonal. The subtext is an appeal to inevitability, which is persuasive precisely because it feels non-ideological. If this is just how pricing works, then anger is misdirected and policy intervention starts to sound naive, even meddlesome.
Context matters here because actors often speak in public as vessels for broader narratives - not as economists, but as amplifiers of a vibe. In an inflationary moment, this is the rhetorical move of the reasonable adult at the table, smoothing panic into acceptance. The line offers a kind of emotional service: it reassures consumers that price hikes aren't a conspiracy, while quietly normalizing that the consumer will, in fact, eat the increase.
It's a soft defense of the status quo dressed up as a basic fact, and that plainness is the power play.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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