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Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

theguardian.com

381–390 of 535 posts

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#381
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This either means that they have a cartel (which is illegal), or they effectively had no choice for some reason or another. ("Inflation" is such a nebulous concept...)

There's quite a few stories outlining how many companies are taking advantage of the "cover" of inflation to take on additional margin. Like, they see cost increases of 5% on their side, but raise prices 10%. It doesn't require a cartel for every notable supplier in a market to have the same idea.

Except they will be immediately undercut by someone that did NOT raise prices !

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#382
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies didn't have a single easy worldwide excuse that people would readily accept for big price hikes. "Oh, it's because of the pandemic" was not a PR strategy available in 2010. See also: 9/11 and various civil liberties.

??? Unless you're in a highly regulated sector like energy or healthcare, in most countries you don't need an excuse to hike prices. Again, the "prices are higher cuz corporate greed" logic fails to account the basic fact that companies are always profit maximizing and no relevant legislation related to corporate profits was passed in most countries. If they can increase prices without losing customers, they will. So…

I think you’re confused between legal and public relations.

The grocery store can legally double the price of bread absent any good reason, but people will flip out.

They didn’t flip out when that exact thing happened during the pandemic, because “it’s the supply chain” made enough sense to people they accepted it.

The pandemic gave them a new way to “increase prices without losing customers” for a while.

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Market price” is a hallucination that you can ignore. You’re not forced to go along with it. It's a powerful signal containing important information! You don't have to go along with it, but it may be beneficial to others if you do. As an example, we bought a new car in 2019. We were planning to sell our old car but every time we were about to sell it, it came in handy - family came to town and we needed two cars,…

> Someone who valued it more than us got to use the vehicle. Was that greed? You sold it because you could get more money for it. That’s what greed is - you chose more money. You could make the case that you weren’t behaving immorally -not everything in life has to be a charity- but you acted out of a selfish desire for more money. I’d also argue that “value it more” is pretty flimsy. Yes in a shortage the buyer clea…

So you give all of your stuff, including your labor/knowledge, away?

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#389
I wondered why this article doesn't have a very obvious thing for the topic it's trying to cover - a photo of mentioned stickers.

Perhaps because it's a rewrite of another article originally for European audience - for example https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/14/carrefour-p...

CNN removed the French photo and also introduced a mistake - when they converted "1.5 litres" for US audience they wrote "0.3 gallons" instead of "0.4"

Re: Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

#390
My pet peeve is that price per round measurement unit (eg kilogram) is in tiny writing compared to product cost, even though they are arguably equally important. Given that the former is mandated, they should also mandate that they appear in equal size fonts on price labels.
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