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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

This rises a lot of questions.

1. Which corporation reported record profits exactly? If that is not a grocery store chain, then it is hurting wrong business.

2. If there were any unjustified increases within the country, how did anti-trust regulator react? If price increase results in bigger profits, i.e. unjustified by increasing costs in the supply chain, it is anti-trust case and government must react. Why not demanding this action?

3. If price increase was due to increasing costs, then it is fair and there is no moral ground in stealing anyway. Instead the government should intervene and subsidize some markets to protect population from inflation shock. Why not demanding this action?

My point is, there exist lawful mechanisms to mitigate the negative economic effects of the current situation in the world. They must be activated by a responsible government. Theft is never a solution to anything.

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> how did anti-trust regulator react

In Canada, our anti-trust regulator is completely feckless and captured by industry.

Time for voters to wake up.

Sounds good, but what should they do once woken up? Vote PC? NDP/Liberal alliance? Bloc? There is literally no one that wouldn’t ultimately bow to corporate interests (source: our entire history).

We don’t have Bernie Sanders or AOC equivalents.

And Canada never had a revolution, so the core theme of its laws are still rooted in how to keep some wealthy family's do-nothing ancestors wealthy without doing anything useful.

> In Canada, our anti-trust regulator is completely feckless and captured by industry.

For non-Canadians, this is by design, our government carved out NAFTA-exempt industries (Grocers, Dairy, Telecom, and Banking) during NAFTA negotiations, subsequently creating protected industries from which we now have oligopolies.

I didn’t know this. When you say they were carved out, you mean carved out from being forced to allow other NAFTA member companies from entering the market at all? Or exempt from having to ensure anti-trust approval would meet international standards?

Effectively both. NAFTA and other trade agreements often let foreign corps initiate trade decisions that normally only a government could invoke.

TransCanada is doing that against the US Gov for cancelling a pipeline project. The company will probably lose, but so much $ is at stake, so it makes sense to try.

They were always exempt from competition. We also didn't bother to open them up as a part of NAFTA, CETA, Canada-SK, etc.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...

Grocery itself has more competition than the rest (thank you Walmart), which is why you gotta be careful when making US shopping trips. I've found rice, oils, canned beans/tomatoes, carrots, bananas, potatoes, onions all cheaper in Canada.

And every year, I get more and more non-perishable grocery stuff from Amazon.ca

Fun fact: Canadians can import non-prescription meds by mail, officially up to 90d supply (so I address it to "Family Scoundreller"), so I cruise ebay for a lot of that stuff.

> Fun fact: Canadians can import non-prescription meds by mail

I am jealous of Americans and their 10,000IU Vitamin D pills. Canada limits the same to 1,000IU per pill. Would this be allowed to cross the border or no?

Officially, no. If you're travelling yourself by car/air/rail/sea, it's incredibly unlikely the officer will even know there's a difference.

Looking up the prescription regulations, only >2500 IU requires a prescription, so if you can find 2500s to import, that's over-the-counter and can be lawfully imported for 90d personal use. https://www.napra.ca/national-drug-schedules/?_nds_drug_name...

If you try to have 10000s mailed from USA by USPS, there's a very rare chance that it could be reviewed by Health Canada and they would deem it prescription-only and seize it, or they could "use their discretion" and still let it through anyway because seizing is a lot more paperwork.

Don't bother with UPS or Fedex shipping into Canada. Ever.

Note: if you're in Canada on a work/study permit, there are some exemptions allowing you to import non-narcotic prescription medications.

>Don't bother with UPS or Fedex shipping into Canada. Ever.

Are you referring to brokerage fees? UPS does not charge brokerage fees if air shipping is used; basically, anything other than Standard qualifies.

As a canadian who lives within walking distance of about 6 different grocery stores (3 major chains and some smaller independent stores), i think things are just fine.

Congratulations, you are in the minority...

I mean, i do live in vancouver. If you live somewhere rural i'm sure you have less options but what do you really expect?

Having options of places to go to pay essentially the same price doesn’t feel fine to me. We’ve got four major chains within a 5 minute drive and two very small independents, and the prices at the chains are all within a few percent of each other unless you want to mix and match each week for the various items on sale. This would normally mean that the market had found the equilibrium price that eliminates excess profits but, like our telecom industry, there are record profits. The variety of options is just for show, masking the inherent price fixing by the oligopoly.

I mean, it seems pretty disputed that there actually is record profits. E.g. https://globalnews.ca/news/9098447/canada-inflation-grocers-...

This link just shows that the profit margin hasn’t increased. Record high profits occur when record high sales occur even if the profit margin is constant.

This link also only looks at gross margin - if revenues and gross profit increase, their fixed operating costs (rent for example is usually fixed for 10-20 years for grocers, or the site is owned by the grocer) are now spread over higher sales so their operating profit (EBIT or EBITDA) can increased dramatically.

> Record high profits occur when record high sales occur even if the profit margin is constant.

Sure, but why would anyone call such a situation profiteering?

Furthermore it seems unlikely that the amount of food canadians have eaten has changed significantly over the last few years. Its not like the population increased significantly.

I'm not disagreeing per se, but you may be interested to listen to this interview with the Competition Commissioner for more perspective. My takeaway is that it's the laws, not the enforcers, that need to change:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/monopoly-7-canadas-compet...

Great interview, thanks for sharing. I don't doubt that he wants things to change. When I refer to the Competition Bureau being feckless and captured by industry, I suppose the conclusion is correct but it should be applied upstream of the Bureau, with the lawmakers themselves enforcing the fecklessness, due to being captured by industry.

Thanks for sharing!

I mean, you could have spent 5 minutes Googling the answers to your questions.

Here is some reading on this topic:

https://www.thestar.com/business/2022/07/09/supermarkets-are...

https://www.thestar.com/business/2022/10/24/canadas-competit...

Suggesting that people who can't afford to eat should liaise with their elected official, who should present it to the legislature, empower the Competition Bureau to properly investigate the issue, then wait for the Competition Bureau to audit these companies and win a case through the judicial system (and that's the ideal case) – well, I think that's going to happen too slow to prevent starvation.

I'm personally worried about this because rising food prices predict riots and rebellions through history. Either prices have to come down, wages have to go up, or we're gonna see a greater loss of social cohesion and we'll have a much bigger problem on our hands. Getting the government to act on this on a macro scale is going to be a huge task given who's in power right now.

I’m not Canadian, so lack context to find the right sources. I assume that in theory government can act on behalf of voters proactively as our (German) government did with heating prices. Apparently, as you and other commenters say, in Canada things are different and popular uprising in the form of grocery theft seems to be the only option. Sorry to hear that.

I'm happy you have a functioning government in Germany!

Counter-point, profit margins have been consistent for the last ~20 years per financial reports:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/ontario/comments/xqigdu/profit_marg...

As for "greedflation", see econ professor Trevor Tombe: "Are rising profits fueling inflation?"

> Rising grocery prices—the focus of Mr. Singh’s attention—also does not reflect rising profit margins. In fact, food stores and food manufacturing [both have lower profit margins this year than last][0].

> One can even see this in the financial statements of large food retailers. Loblaws, for example, [reported a net profit margin][1] of 3.04 percent in the second quarter of this year and 3.03 percent in the second quarter of last year. Their rising profits are due entirely to rising sales, not increasingly uncompetitive behaviour as some suggest. > > The entire increase in average markups in Canada are therefore related to rising global energy and commodity prices.

[…]

> There are of course important issues to explore and debate when it comes to the level of competition in certain areas of corporate Canada, and there are also many overlapping causes of rising consumer prices. But when it comes to claims that “greedflation” is a key driver of recently rising inflation rates, the data is very clear: it’s not.

* https://thehub.ca/2022-10-14/trevor-tombe-are-rising-profits...

* https://twitter.com/trevortombe/status/1580935693672775681

[0] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/cv!recreate.action?p...

[1] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/L:TSE?hl=en

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