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Business 54 July | 2022 By Phillip M. Perry percent for the year ended March 2022, which is an average of all items. Among items that impact the fl oral industry, prices for fuel oil increased 70.1 percent, gasoline prices increased 48.0 percent, natural gas prices increased 21.6 percent and electricity prices increased 11.1 percent. e resulting upticks in operating costs can cause serious damage to a business's bottom line. "We're in a very unfortunate situation now," says Bill Conerly, Ph.D., principal of Conerly Consulting in Lake Oswego, Ore. "Retailers that have always devoted their eff orts to serving customers and being productive also must start worrying about covering their costs in the most eff ective way. ey now need to shift some of their focus to coping with infl ation." e challenge is all the greater for its unfamiliarity: It's been 30 years since infl ation was much of a player in company planning. Most experts don't see relief any time soon. ey point to a number of root causes, one of which is energy. "With the cost of oil baked into so many things, it seems we are going to see more signifi cant infl ation in the months ahead," says John McQuaig, CPA, M.B.A., managing partner of J Kramer and Associates, a Wenatchee, Wash.,-based CPA fi rm. He points to a continuing global disruption in the delivery of goods and services as yet another cause. "Supply-chain issues tend to create opportunities to raise prices because of the eff ect of supply and demand. When the former is crunched, prices go up by the nature of the market." And there's yet a third driver of higher costs: a wage spiral resulting from the pandemic's softening eff ect on the labor supply. Infl ation has taken root and is rising faster than any time in recent memory. Retailers everywhere are dealing with annualized cost increases of more than 8 percent—the fastest pace in 40 years and signifi cantly higher than the 1.8 percent average of the past decade. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, e Consumer Price Index increased 8.5