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Comment by jfil | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you that Canada has a very unique attitude to competition - it's "Can't we all just get along?"

Regarding food, I beg to differ. The top 3 grocers have price-fixed bread [1] (one prosecution since that article), wage-fixed [2] and have no-compete agreements for certain times of the year [3]. Food prices are not driven by underlying costs here.

1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bread-price-fixing-loblaw-1... 2. https://financialpost.com/news/economy/how-hero-pay-scandal-... 3. https://www.cochranetimespost.ca/opinion/columnists/charlebo...

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as per the articles, the investigation that yielded guilty pleas for price fixing was 20 years ago, the current investigation has had no results so the CBC is just narrative churning there. that the "hero pay" was coordinated hardly amounts to wage fixing unless you are litigating like a union rep.

Food prices are absolutely driven by costs, there is no other basis for them.

Loblaws is a luxury retailer with a limited set of stores and hardly counts as competitive. When someone complains about margins on certain products, ask them to explain complementary goods to you. This project is theatre for people whose understanding of economics ends at monopoly and scrooge mcduck.

> Loblaws is a luxury retailer with a limited set of stores and hardly counts as competitive.

Uh? Loblaws is the largest or only grocery chain in many parts of Canada.

Loblaws owns a huge variety of grocery stores in Canada and they also have a bank (President's Choice Financial) as well as large real estate holdings. There are a fair amount of places in Canada that only have a Loblaws store in the vicinity. As a Canadian, painting them as some sort of boutique luxury store is very strange to me as they have huge grocery stores and are generally considered to be on the cheaper side. You can see by this graph here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/481019/leading-grocery-r... that Loblaws is probably the biggest grocery retailer in Canada.

> Loblaws is a luxury retailer

Is that why they own the chain "No Frills"?

> with a limited set of stores

Only in the sense that it is a finite number of stores. Loblaw Companies is Canada's largest food retailer.

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