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Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

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Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#121

Post by motohagiography »

jfil wrote: post #105
motohagiography wrote: post #50

canada's attitude toward competition is different than that of the US though. our agricultural products (dairy, wheat, maple syrup, and to a lesser extent retail beer and alcohols) are controlled by state monopolies who set prices. the reason food is so expensive is because of fuel costs from the last few years, which were further not-helped by both an increase in federal taxes on fuel and the semi-official policy of…

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…

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.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#122

Post by SG- »

i like this but it's only tracking price changes for the final sale price. there's so much movement in grocery stores when it comes to supplier and product costs that will show the whole picture.

you'd have to have someone who has access to the internal systems that could also track the profit on each item and track that.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#123

Post by [deleted] »

sys32768 wrote: post #98

I live 70 miles from the Canada border where we whine about Canadians crowding our Costco. I roughly counted their plates in one section of the parking lot and about every fifth plate was from Alberta. Edit: I have also witnessed Canadians in awe at how inexpensive was the stack of chewing tobacco they purchased.

[deleted]

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#124

Post by richbell »

motohagiography wrote: post #121
jfil wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 limite…

> 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.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#125

Post by [deleted] »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #119
delichon wrote: post #108

Say I set my apple prices at 0.5 standard deviations below the average prices I can find in the vicinity. Is that an attempt to undercut the market or collude with it? If I set the price to the average, is that collusion or just trying to maximize my profit on apples? If I set it higher than average, is that collusion, or me telling the market that I think I have premium apples? How do you get from correlation to col…

Does that matter except as a philosophical question? The point of a free market in practice is to ensure that sale values are correlated with, and reasonably close to, production costs. If an ostensibly free market is not producing competition which causes that to happen, it's a problem for society; then, it is society's prerogative to use whatever means appropriate to fix it. That could include, depending on the ide…

[deleted]

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#126

Post by daedrdev »

jlos wrote: post #116
a13n wrote: post #84

Love this project. I just moved from Toronto, and compared to the US was frustrated by how every major industry in Canada was basically an oligopoly. In Canada if you look at telecoms, banks, insurance, grocers, airlines, etc – there are a few major competitors and that's about it. It's very difficult to start a competitor, often for regulatory reasons, and most smaller competitors end up getting bought out by the bi…

Canada is intentionally setup to produce oligopolies as a defense against large American companies: "Canada was, in a lot of ways, built on monopolies — think about the Hudson’s Bay Company or Canadian Pacific Rail. Canada has always feared that if we don’t let our homegrown companies get huge, we’ll get swamped by American competitors. That’s why there’s a tension between Canadian politicians, who often say they’re…

Which is a self reinforcing cycle as the badly run Canadian companies need state monopolies to remain competitive

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#127

Post by VancouverMan »

FredPret wrote: post #90
a13n wrote: post #84

Love this project. I just moved from Toronto, and compared to the US was frustrated by how every major industry in Canada was basically an oligopoly. In Canada if you look at telecoms, banks, insurance, grocers, airlines, etc – there are a few major competitors and that's about it. It's very difficult to start a competitor, often for regulatory reasons, and most smaller competitors end up getting bought out by the bi…

From your description it sounds as if we're stuck in a local optimum. It's tough to break out of that, but there's a lot of technological change coming our way and that tends to disrupt the status quo.

The numerous problems that Canada is facing today are ultimately caused by government interference.

While we've certainly seen technology cause and enable change in the private sector, the public sector can basically just ignore disruptive technologies without any real consequences.

If the public sector ever did face any sort of real disruption due to technology, the public sector would likely just regulate away the technology that's causing them problems.

The situation is made worse by a big proportion of the Canadian population being heavily dependent, directly or indirectly, on large and inefficient government. This includes much of the mainstream media, in addition to the overtly government-controlled services (education, health care, policing, etc.), and government itself (politicians, bureaucrats, etc.). These people have no incentive for positive change, and actually a lot of incentive for things to get much worse than they already are.

I think it'll be a mix of economic and demographic factors that eventually result in change, rather than technological factors.

Decades of awful immigration policies have created a society in Canada that's now extremely fractured, well beyond the traditional (and mild in comparison) English/French divide that has already caused enough problems in the past.

Eventually, the already-severe economic inefficiency imposed by government will become unsustainable, and economic troubles will result in "Balkanization" occurring. It will be particularly bad in parts of Ontario and BC, where we already see this beginning to happen.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#128

Post by the_cat_kittles »

surgicalcolor wrote: post #111
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #92

‘’’ Reach out to me (email “jacob” at this website) if: You can do economic analysis of pricing data, and especially the interaction/correlation of multiple streams of prices across time ‘’’ The item in that quote is significantly, significantly harder than the author is giving it credit for. Canada has a competition policy agency. They are (almost surely) entitled to demand data from firms as part of an investigatio…

Conversely, I think you're overestimating the technical capailities of Canadian federal or provincial regulatory organizations. Government departments notoriously have serious technical debt, so while they might entitled to demand this kind of data, I sincerely doubt they are doing it with anything resembling modern data analysis. These orgs aren't going to have working data lakes, spark clusters or data warehouses o…

never underestimate a nerd with moral high ground

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#129

Post by the_cat_kittles »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #92

‘’’ Reach out to me (email “jacob” at this website) if: You can do economic analysis of pricing data, and especially the interaction/correlation of multiple streams of prices across time ‘’’ The item in that quote is significantly, significantly harder than the author is giving it credit for. Canada has a competition policy agency. They are (almost surely) entitled to demand data from firms as part of an investigatio…

isnt the difference that when you have an open dataset, you get many many more eyeballs, and some very passionate ones. and they can make it their hobby, unconstrained by day to day needs of a job. eh?

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#130

Post by rectang »

a13n wrote: post #84

Love this project. I just moved from Toronto, and compared to the US was frustrated by how every major industry in Canada was basically an oligopoly. In Canada if you look at telecoms, banks, insurance, grocers, airlines, etc – there are a few major competitors and that's about it. It's very difficult to start a competitor, often for regulatory reasons, and most smaller competitors end up getting bought out by the bi…

Interesting history! For the record, it's not like telecoms aren't an oligopoly in the USA, with the attendant "crazy shitty" customer service.
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