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Comment by nivenkos | Hacker News Reader

A lot of Europe is suffering shortages the same though, it's just that in the UK the supermarkets refused to pay more.

Whereas like here in Sweden you can buy tomatoes, but they now cost $10 per kg.

Production costs varying over the seasons or supply availability I can understand.

I can't understand how /every/ UK supermarket chain made the same decision to decline the higher costs without asking myself if they spoke to each other about it. Emergent behaviour caused by racing to the bottom?

Anti price gouging laws prevent them jacking up prices when there is tight supply. They literally can't offer to pay more.

And yet there is price inflation. How is that any different?

What laws? Would be interesting to see some analysis of this.

This is nonsense. There is no UK "price gouging" legislation applicable to paying more to import foodstuffs

The law is against 'unfair business practices', but the Competition and Markets Authority took action when businesses raised the price of hand sanitizer when there was lots of demand in 2020.

Now businesses generally can't make big price shifts due to increased demand or constrained supply.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cma-and-trade-bod...

The CMA investigated whether firms were stockpiling hand sanitizer and making excessive profits on it by creating artificial shortages, at a time when hand sanitizer was being promoted as an essential good. As your link acknowledges, they then promptly closed all the cases without further action.

Paying more to suppliers to import a particular non-essential foodstuff in a year in which most food prices have risen is even less likely to invite action.

If fuel prices can legally double overnight and fuel vendors make larger markups as global prices stabilise without the CMA batting an eyelid, it's quite hard to pretend that the CMA is the obstacle to us having access to the same food supply chains as European supermarkets...

Except that isn't a law. Although if they were all shown to be acting in concert, not buying tomatoes in order to get a better price. That would be illegal.

Well, it's winter now - I'd expect off season fruits and vegetables to be more expensive? Or do you mean that tomatoes are more expensive now than last winter?

"off-season tomatoes" hasn't been a thing in decades. Tomatoes are available at affordable prices all year long.

Well, I would hardly call 10$/kilo affordable.

Where I live ( France), at the height of the season, and assuming you live in the south, good tomato will cost about 2-3$/kilo. In winter you can indeed buy tomatoes (for more money) which look like tomatoes but are tasteless and are therefore a different kind of product. It might be possible to get good tomatoes as well, but I assume this will incur a significant premium, at which point I no longer consider them affordable.

>Well, I would hardly call 10$/kilo affordable.

They have always been affordable, now they are not

I understand what you mean, I may not have been very clear at all by adding product quality to the mix. So let me try again.

At least in France, there are price fluctuations : typically in season is 2 eur/kilo and off season is 4 eur/kilo (and these are current prices), which means twice as expensive.

My question to the poster living in Sweden was, given that we are in winter: are in-season tomatoes 10$/kilo as well, or is it only the case for off-season tomatoes, and in-season are still 5$/kilo, which, while expensive, is much more affordable ?

You should try canned tomatoes.

I sometimes use tomatoes for my winter dishes (pizza, Ukrainian borscht and Indian Dahl), it used to be terrible. I've since learned that most canned vegetables do not have anything added when canned (not even salt or similar, it's just hot water basically), changed to that, and now I cook almost as much in winter than I do during summer.

This is very true, and what I do now. This doesn't work for all vegetables, but works really well with tomatoes.

Grown in massive greenhouses require electric etc thus the cost has gone up because the cost of fuel has gone up, including transporting these things across the continent.

Thanks, this is very interesting. So basically the on/off season cycle gets a lot worse because off season requires more power.

I still do not get why people buy those sad pale tomatoes in winter.

I've never seen a "sad pale tomato", regardless of the season.

The dutch greenhouse tomatoes were so sad and pale in the 90s our eastern neighbours called them 'holländische Wasserbombe' (dutch waterbombs). They're better nowadays. As it turns out it's more profitable to plant tomatoes people actually want to eat...

Tesco tomatoes are a bright, happy red - and remain so even after six months in the fridge.

Yes can't easily use the colour to judge how tasty tomatoes are, some of the best ones I've ever had were a big green looking, but were grown in the Portuguese sun naturally.

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