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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

Elaborate? I've already explained that price-fixing does sometimes happen, but it's illegal and governments do crack down on it. People like money, but they also like to stay out of prison and avoid losing that money in settlements.

If anyone is making a just-so argument, it's those claiming "greedflation". The idea that record profits must equate to something nefarious happening is in my view a simplistic just-so statement. At least in America, people built up record savings during the pandemic, and then spent those savings in record numbers once the lockdowns ended. Record profits during a period of record spending seems rather unsurprising, doesn't it?

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It's not price fixing. It's what's stocked by big retailers.

Real world example.

Heinz Baked Beans, UK. There are tons of other baked beans brands, but almost every store has Heinz. It dominates the shelf space by a huge margin.

Heinz is specifically called out in the article. They've made massive hikes in price, everyone's complaining about it, but often it's the only product on the shelf for a common, quick meal ingredient in UK meals.

There is no choice. It's not a simple economic choice. Most people can't choose the cheaper brand as often there's no choice.

Heinz Tomato Ketchup is/was in an even more dominant position. Many mid-sized grocery stores literally only stocked Heinz. (the co-op one is a pretty good substitute btw).

While theoretically there is consumer choice in the market, the reality is that it's wasn't true unless you want to go round a bunch of different shops.

In the long run Heinz has done some serious damage to their brand, but short/mid term are making juicy profits as the market is so slow to correct due to the way supermarkets work. How shelf space is allocated. By how the industry has become a small amount of ridiculously large companies hiding behind a patchwork of acquired brands.

If Heinz is the only supplier of baked beans, that is literally just a monopoly. In that case you have a monopoly problem, not an inflation problem.

Do you all not have private label brands? I’ve never been in a UK grocery store but it is hard for me to fathom that you would only have one brand of baked beans, given it is a food regularly consumed in the UK (or so I’m led to understand by the abomination that is beans and toast).

You misunderstood me slightly. It is not the only supplier. It is just the vastly dominant brand on the shelves.

We have a few supermarket brands that have taken over every town and village local store.

As space is constrained in those stores (long story to do with Sunday trading laws), they stock one, two or three brand of lots of different items. Like there's one choice of poppadoms. Or one brand of english mustard. And one brand of Dijon mustard. Etc.

So the stores have a wide selection of goods, but a shallow selection of each individual good.

In the case of baked beans, you will always have Heinz. You might have one other choice, depending on the supermarket brand. Often the other choice is cheap, and nowhere near as tasty.

Bigger stores have more choice.

One noticeable change is that co-op didn't used to bother stocking their own brand ketchup in smaller stores. It sold so poorly Vs Heinz it wasn't worth the shelf space. That has changed, and I'm sure other super markets are making similar changes. For context Heinz has decided on a ridiculous £4.50 a bottle, while the Co-op own brand is £1.90. Heinz used to be about £2.50-£2.90ish I think before the greedflation.

>In the case of baked beans, you will always have Heinz. You might have one other choice, depending on the supermarket brand. Often the other choice is cheap, and nowhere near as tasty.

>Bigger stores have more choice.

So why isn't there a brand that's cheap and tasty? Does Heinz have some sort of proprietary bean tech that others can't replicate? Is there a fundamental trade-off between tastiness and price?

In many cases—yes, there is a straightforward tradeoff between taste—or quality, more generally—and price.

In particular, with most of the cheapest mainstream brands, they've spent years finding the cheapest they can produce the product for that customers will still accept.

Basically, if the beans could be made tastier, while still being that cheap, Heinz would have done that already, leaving no room for a competitor to do so.

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