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Sounds like Metro just admitted to illegal price collusion to me. If this isn’t illegal in Canada, perhaps the law is the problem?
I'm sure there is a theory of how this would reduce prices - what is it? Real estate markets became infinitely more transparent over the last couple of years, to the extent that the data is used to train data scientist. The result? Speculators entered the market at it's messed up.
I read this title as "reduce collision in a Canadian grocery store" and thought this was an app for parking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would demonstrate collusion? Very similar prices could be a sign of close competition, and razor-thin margins. Varying prices could also be a sign of close competition, with grocers choosing loss-leaders to lure customers into the store.
Look at the data for Austria presented in the link in the article. Supermarkets raised and lowered prices on the same day to the exact same amount and lots of other pretty damning evidence.
Top three grocery companies in Norway, which have almost the entire grocery market here between them, just got fined[1] for price collusion. They'd signal rising prices for a category by rising the price on certain products within that category, was one accusation. Extensive use of price scouts aided in this. Initially the fine was much larger, but ended up at about 450M USD total between the three. For comparison, t…
Norgesgruppen's 2005 annual report shows a profit margin of 2.2%. In 2021, that ballooned to 3.8%. That's almost a 75% growth in margin.
Doesn't making this data available also provide it to the grocers? Is it still "collusion" if they all just start raising their prices to public benchmarks on any items where they're low? They're not "working with each other" now. They're just "analyzing the publicly available data to remain competitive."
This data set is from scraping online grocery store prices over a period of time, it's not live. It wouldn't improve grocer's price data harvesting, but it does slightly reduce the gap between what they have in hand, and what the public and press can have in hand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would demonstrate collusion? Very similar prices could be a sign of close competition, and razor-thin margins. Varying prices could also be a sign of close competition, with grocers choosing loss-leaders to lure customers into the store.
Look at the data for Austria presented in the link in the article. Supermarkets raised and lowered prices on the same day to the exact same amount and lots of other pretty damning evidence.
If supermarkets are getting together and forming handshake agreements like “we will not change prices between November and February”, like Canadian supermarkets apparently did, then that could constitute collusion.
Oh man, we really need this for telecom too. And even more important than their collusion is their political corruption, so the government protects them from competition and funnels endless billions in taxpayer money to them.