Why on earth are people and government stooges suddenly targeting grocery stores for collusion and price gouging? If there is an industry with a lower profit margin, I'm not aware of it.
And the same people that colluded on bread just so happen to sell other grocery goods. Some people think: "hey, maybe we should check out the other stuff they sell". Which seems reasonable to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada
From an anecdotal standpoint, when many of the groceries I buy seem to have gone up in price at a rate well outpacing inflation, I can't help but wonder what the hell is going on.
Yes, it obviously shouldn't have happened, but there's no piñata of profit just waiting to be smashed apart that would magically drop grocery bills.
But this ignores other ways grocers make money (at much higher margin) — e.g. by charging their suppliers for shelf space/positioning.
So they can collude on just a few essentials, like I don't know... Bread maybe? And make an absolute killing on bread and mask those profits by claiming that their overall profits are down?
1. If they actually want to make a profit, surely it'd make sense to price fix some high value/volume item rather than something cheap like bread? If anything choosing to price fix bread seems more like incompetence than evil villainy.
2. The parent specifically acknowledges that price fixing isn't okay, but his contention is that overall margins is still low. Who cares if margins for a certain item is high? Are you also upset that mcdonalds make orders of magnitude higher margin on soda than burgers?
Weird that they price-fixed bread for so long then. If it wasn't for profit, was it just for pure hatred of poor people or what?
>If anything choosing to price fix bread seems more like incompetence than evil villainy.
I don't buy "incompetence" as an excuse for a 15-year price-fixing scheme.
>Who cares if margins for a certain item is high?
Who cares if margins across the board are low?
>Are you also upset that mcdonalds make orders of magnitude higher margin on soda than burgers?
I'm upset that there is a history of collusion in the pricing of the food I have to buy to live. I support efforts to make sure more collusion is not happening.
I'm not sure why you're going so hard on this strawman. At no point did I argue it was okay to price fix. In fact in my previous comment I was pointing out specifically that it wasn't okay.
>Who cares if margins across the board are low?
>I'm upset that there is a history of collusion in the pricing of the food I have to buy to live. I support efforts to make sure more collusion is not happening.
Your original claim was "many of the groceries I buy seem to have gone up in price at a rate well outpacing inflation". arcticbull's response was that grocery store margins have stayed low. That seems like a perfectly reasonable response to your claim. You also mentioned bread price fixing, but I don't think anyone is claiming "well their margins are low so price fixing doesn't exist". It's clear that he was addressing your point about overall grocery prices. In that context looking at overall inflation makes more sense than pointing out one specific item has high margins. More to the point, inflation is derived from the price changes from a basket of items. It's therefore almost guaranteed that there's going to be items that will rise higher than inflation. The mere fact that some prices are rising faster than inflation isn't evidence of collusion or price fixing.
You literally said: "choosing to price fix bread seems more like incompetence than evil villainy"
Replying to that is a strawman? Okay.
That said, one of the government reports linked in the article[1] does mention that profit margins have edged up slightly, albeit on the order of 1-2 percentage points.
[1] https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/how-we-foster-competiti...
From the point of view of the average man however, the grocery store is exactly where he is facing inflation daily! This makes it the ideal scapegoat.
The average man will never ever realize that the monetary mass surged during covid while real world production slowed down. More dollars chasing fewer goods & services equals rising prices. That monetary policy smoothed out the COVID downturn and it was a great success, but it was not a free lunch.
In Canada, the grocery stores were caught colluding. Recently. Is it still a "boogeyman" when they were caught in a 15 year long collusion scheme?
For reference, a dozen eggs shot up by a 1.50 since 2022 alone.
Go after the collusion yes but that's not where inflation is coming from.
The title of the article is "reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector", not "blame grocery for inflation".
Ctrl+f for inflation in the article doesn't even turn up a result.
[1] https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/how-we-foster-competiti...
Investigation started in 2017 and there was a guilty plea and $50M fine issued in 2023.
>If it is some of Trudeau’s stooges said so, I would not believe it for a second.
What a silly statement. But no, there were confessions and fines and everything!
To add insult to injury, the average Canadian will still brags how effective the COV lockdowns were compared to rest of the world especially big brother USA.
"Inflation" is really the magical bogeyman invented to make people not ask questions about the companies actually raising prices and to instead think everything is controlled by the government. Pay no attention to the CEO and shareholders on their yachts.