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Comment by charles_f | Hacker News Reader

This is great, shrinkflation is one of these disgusting practices that play on the human psyche to trick people.

But also carrefour (and large retailers like them) are notorious for abusing their power when buying, and are a large part of the systemic problem. I don't know how much this is negotiating technique.

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I watched a documentary on this a few weeks ago. In France, there's 2 big groups which control outsized % of whole market. They squeeze producers really hard.

They have a lot of abusive rules in contracts which are unrealistic. Like, you must deliver your stuff to market X precisely at 2AM, not before not after, and for every minute of delay you pay a large fine. Now, when trying to deliver to N markets during same night, there's always delays in some of the places because the recipients in market Z are slow - fines are on the producers.

All the extra promos etc in supermarkets (buy 2 get 3) are funded by the producers as well.

> I don't know how much this is negotiating technique.

100%. What else would it be?

It could be a marketing tactic.

ideally serves as both

Reputation. When you see a different size for the first time at big chains they sometimes are not a change to the manufacturers normal lines.

(If you have much faster turn over than other places your customer's shop that could also reinforce the perception that you are complicit.)

I don't know anything about them as a corporate citizen, but out of the (many) supermarket chains here in France I like them the best. They are not the cheapest, but the quality/price ratio is usually correct and the store branded items are very good.

Their store brand is good, but their practices with their suppliers are disgusting, just like the others.

As a buyer, they have a reputation to be driving producers to the ground. Their buying power is so large that they can pretty much dictate the costs, which drives all sorts of issues - brankrupting the smaller ones, lowering the quality across the board, forcing them to take shortcuts, cheating, shrinkflating, etc.

There's a general push in supermarkets to move consumers towards own-brand goods as the profit margin is higher. It wouldn't surprise me if this was a marketing tactic to push people in this direction.

And carrefour is among the worst offenders on this topic.

Does it matter if the customer benefits?

It’s like Yelp, though.

If they’re just wielding power over manufacturers, they also have the power to give into negotiations to remove the labels if manufacturers pay enough.

Which means it’s ultimately no longer about benefiting the customers, but squeezing as much as they can from manufacturers, and we end up with only get part of the truth.

I suppose hypothetically if they were murdering their suppliers' employees then we'd need to put a stop to that. But otherwise yeah, all the more power to them.

Ah, the "sicilian haircut" ?

It does, I won't applaud Putin if he switches to electric tanks. (not that Carrefour is Putin, but you get the point - a marginal fix from someone who is a nontrivial cause of a problem is not a triumph)

This is a good idea, shame drives change, and it's good that customers get better information.

But also, the customer rarely benefits from large monopolies leveraging their power. Somehow they're always the losing bystander in these battles. I'm suspecting that the real motive is different, and I don't know the long term consequences of how they're gonna leverage that new negotiation tool. (maybe they won't display it if the manufacturer gives them a discount?). And then maybe it's just marketing, maybe there's no motive, and they want to show they are supportive of their customers. But then once a buyer realizes the tool they have to leverage an extra discount, it may change.

Forgive for being suspicious when an actor that has historically always been acting on their own capitalistic interests starts doing something that is not.

That's hardly abuse of economical power. Wake me up if they decide to remove some label due to a negotiation. Otherwise, that's the slippery slope fallacy, that is false on practice about as often as it's true.

It is not the slippery slope fallacy, it's the proposition that everything that can be used for nefarious purposes eventually will. Someone who repeatedly abuses their economical power doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt, is my point.

They are doing a good thing, but it's bad because that good thing may allow them to do something bad later?

Sorry, but I'll ask for them to be punished when they try to do the bad thing. Not earlier.

They can do nefarious things whenever they want. They don't need to normalize a good thing first, there are all kinds of anticompetitive actions they can do right now without complex scheming. (And yeah, they constantly do many of those, but still, without any complex scheming.)

From an article on cnn:

> Carrefour CEO Alexandre Bompard, who also heads French retail industry lobby group FDC, has repeatedly said consumer goods companies are not cooperating in efforts to cut the price of thousands of staples despite a fall in the cost of raw materials.

> The shrinkflation warnings are in all French Carrefour stores, and will last until the targeted suppliers agree to price cuts, Bompais said.

100% just a negotiation tactic

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