[HN Gopher] Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian gro...
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Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 207 points
Date : 2024-09-09 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobfilipp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobfilipp.com)
| juujian wrote:
| 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.
| juliend2 wrote:
| Good point. But is there an oligopoly in the Canadian real
| estate market though?
|
| I assume the premise of Project Hammer is that transparency
| applied on the food industry would underline some collusion and
| invite for a debate on whether there's some legislation to
| apply against such an oligopoly.
| boringg wrote:
| Is the premise that the bread scandal is just the tip of the
| iceberg?
| nickff wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| nickff wrote:
| Those instances do look suspicious, though it's likely
| that both vendors were sourcing from the same supplier
| and/or one was matching their competitor's pricing. I'd
| be interested to see what proportion of the own-brand
| goods this had happened for, whether the same store was
| always first to raise prices, and what their supply
| chains looked like.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Supermarkets often publish upcoming sale prices in
| advance, and matching your competitor's prices is not
| collusion. On the contrary, it's a sign of healthy
| competition!
|
| 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.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Lowering prices together makes sense. But why would you
| raise your prices of a commodity product to match your
| competitor's? If they are going to raise, you hold and
| rake in the extra sales.
| kaibee wrote:
| Do people really go comparison shop between stores? Like,
| I recognize that I'm coming from a more privileged
| economic position to not do so, but I still go to the
| cheap grocery store because it's the closest to me.
|
| I'd imagine that even for low-income people, it's the
| cost/benefit of comparison shopping has been squeezed out
| by how much prices change on a day-to-day basis. Like
| sure, if you're buying a lot of something all at once it
| might make sense to do on that occasion, but once you do
| that a few times you either learn:
|
| 1. Which store usually has the lowest price (and if they
| have coupons for store X, they might just only go there,
| because... they can't use the coupon at the competitor's)
|
| 2. The difference in price doesn't offset the time-cost
| of going to multiple stores (and the consolidation of
| stores means that going to two different stores will take
| even more travel time).
|
| So, if most people aren't really doing comparison
| shopping anyway, then you make more money by matching
| your prices to your competition.
| adamomada wrote:
| Some people do, based on what I hear from my parents. It
| could be that seniors have more free time and are more
| astounded by higher food prices that the spend their time
| shopping at multiple supermarkets to get everything they
| want at low(er) cost.
|
| Of course the time it takes to do this makes it all but
| impossible to actually save money, so it has to be a
| small portion of their customers.
|
| I have heard that only something like 10% of customers
| actually give a shit about prices at all, and it is them
| who keep the prices in check for everyone else. i.e. with
| razor margins, the retailers can't afford to lose that
| 10% customer base
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Why are stores changing prices so frequently if it has no
| impact on sales?
|
| Yes, the vast majority of people don't comparison shop.
| But people do decide to not buy something if it seems it
| is too expensive and vice versa, and the effects are seen
| on the statistical level.
| hibikir wrote:
| It's pretty easy for things to not be actual collusion to
| end up looking like it, and having the very same negative
| effects" You don't need handshakes in backrooms.
|
| This will be even more popular in situations like
| supermarkets, where a significant part of the stock has
| an expiration date that isn't so far from today. Turning
| your inventory too fast is just as bad as turning it too
| slowly, so there can be immediate reactions to make sure
| things are being consumed at just the right speed. And
| the more uniform the models of consumption the
| supermarkets are running, the more similar their
| decisions will be anyway.
|
| So I wonder if we even need to focus on needing damning
| evidence, or on whether there is collusion, and instead
| aim for what we want: Dynamics that put negative
| pressures on prices. If we aren't seeing that, I don't
| care much about how much is collusion, and how much is
| models that have tacit agreements because, as market
| players optimize for what is best for them, there are
| solutions where high prices across the board makes all
| sellers win.
| juujian wrote:
| I'm afraid it might have the opposite effect - made collusion
| easier.
| gruez wrote:
| >The result? Speculators entered the market at it's messed up.
|
| That seems like a stretch. What's the casual mechanism behind
| increased accessibility of data driving up prices? At least
| with something like stocks you could blame HFT firms piling
| into the market or whatever. It seems far more plausible that
| prices rose for other reasons (take your pick of: NIMBYism,
| immigration, foreign investors, etc.), and the increased
| accessibility of data happened to coincide with the price rise
| (ie. similar to https://xkcd.com/925/).
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| Imagine we sell groceries. If I have real-time access to your
| prices, and you to mine, then I have no incentive to try to
| outbid you to my customers since you will see my cheap potato
| sale sooner than my customers will, and announce your own
| equivalent sale. Knowing you have access to my prices, I can
| also increase them safe in the knowledge that you will follow
| me very soon, since that means we both win. That is how
| sharing prices with no friction leads to less competition.
| hobs wrote:
| That's not how that worked - real estate data was always fairly
| public and if you had enough money it was straightforward to
| hoover it up - the change in approach was more about the last
| housing crisis and then ZIRP buoying huge tech and real estate
| interests to drive into home buying in the first place.
|
| We had people who were underwater for years combined with a new
| market that cant afford the extremely high fixed costs and end
| up eventually paying rents higher than the mortgage in many
| principalities.
|
| If you have a ton of capital it makes perfect sense to park it
| in a place where you have a guaranteed return.
| saghm wrote:
| Is speculation as much of a concern for groceries? Real estate
| is an asset you can hold onto for a while, but I feel like
| buying up groceries just means you'll have a lot of expired
| food pretty soon if you can't find a buyer.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This actually happened to onions in the US so now we have
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I'm feeling bearish on raw salmon
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Not sure if the author is here, but the downloadable SQLite
| database significantly benefits from applying compression (~75%
| with gzip).
|
| Also, is there a write-up of how they collected the prices? I
| have wanted to do a similar analysis for years, but immediately
| gave up realizing I would be spending 95% of my efforts scraping
| and entity matching. By and large manufacturers seem to go out of
| their way offer unique SKUs intentionally to avoid comparisons.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I was going to mention that your browser almost certainly sends
| an Accept-Encoding: gzip header, but it appears the server
| doesn't care to sent a Content-Encoding: gzip back!
| jfil wrote:
| I am the author - I appreciate your comment & the parent
| comment. I'll make the sqlite file more manageable shortly
| (wasn't expecting the project to get this much attention so
| its taking a while to catch up with everything!)
| tomComb wrote:
| 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.
| arcticbull wrote:
| You know what actually works great for reducing the price of
| cell plans in Canada is a public option.
|
| There's one province where people pay roughly half the national
| average for all there telecom needs - and that's Saskatchewan.
| SaskTel's mere existence keeps all the majors in line.
|
| Manitobans should be absolutely up in arms over the
| privatization of Manitoba Telecom.
|
| Canada has a ton of land and just not that many people. There's
| 3 + Videotron major telecom operators servicing a population
| the size of California spread out over a land area the size of
| the United States. The Capex and payback period for spinning up
| a new, competitive, national carrier is wild (there's a pile of
| bodies there proving my point) which makes this a perfect job
| for the government.
| gruez wrote:
| >There's one province where people pay roughly half the
| national average for all there telecom needs - and that's
| Saskatchewan. SaskTel's mere existence keeps all the majors
| in line.
|
| Source? Looking at sasktel's website and rogers' website,
| this claim does not pass the sniff test. Their "basic" plan
| is $60/month (BYOD) for 15GB of data, whereas rogers gives
| you 75GB for $65. Even if you don't use 15GB of data and that
| extra $5 brings you no benefit, the price difference is
| nowhere near high enough to justify the claim "people pay
| roughly half the national average".
| arcticbull wrote:
| Probably marketing/promos for new customers vs. actual
| realized, and I strongly suspect if you click through those
| Rogers plans you'll land on a _much_ higher total cost.
|
| https://hellosafe.ca/en/telecommunications/cell-phone-
| plans/...
| gruez wrote:
| I clicked through and see no time limited discount, only
| a $5 "automatic payments discount", whatever that means.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I looked again after your response, the Rogers plans all
| state "for new customers only" which is probably the
| discrepancy. Every time I speak with my parents I'm
| shocked how much they're paying and I have to spend an
| hour renegotiating.
| Marsymars wrote:
| A few years out of date, but the competition bureau has
| this review from 2019 comparing pricing between provinces:
| https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/how-we-foster-
| competiti...
|
| My takeaway from that is that Sasktel/MTS were much cheaper
| for a comparable plan, but the average revenue per user is
| near-identical - so the effect is mostly just that
| Sasktel/MTS users got more data with their plans. (Which
| tracks to me, if you halved the revenue of a provincial-
| scale carrier, they'd be a huge money loser regardless of
| how many executive salaries got cut or efficiencies got
| discovered.)
| mewse-hn wrote:
| > Manitobans should be absolutely up in arms over the
| privatization of Manitoba Telecom.
|
| There are a lot of us in Manitoba who know this was a crime
| and we can do fuck-all to change it
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > there's a pile of bodies there proving my point
|
| They make great organ donors though!
|
| (Not all were economic failures: you can also be a successful
| and scrappy going concern and that gets you acquired by
| bigger pockets with a rubber stamp from government that
| thinks bigger firms are better for all)
| TeeMassive wrote:
| You know the collusion is bad when a government enterprise
| can be two times cheaper.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| You seem to be implying that a public enterprise can't
| compete so well against private enterprise on price by
| definition. Why do you think this?
| nazcan wrote:
| Prices have come down a lot. I have reasonable plans from black
| Friday at like $30ish/month.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| Are you Canadian or aware of the history of Canadian grocery
| chains?
| gruez wrote:
| cynical take: grocery prices are more salient to consumers
| because they see it every week, therefore governments target
| them to score political points with voters.
|
| 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...
| ziddoap wrote:
| Well, one reason is that Canada had a ~15 year bread price-
| fixing scandal come to light somewhat recently.
|
| 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.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Sure, but even during the price fixing period Loblaws' profit
| margin was sub-5%, and currently sits a 3.3%.
|
| Yes, it obviously shouldn't have happened, but there's no
| pinata of profit just waiting to be smashed apart that would
| magically drop grocery bills.
| derefr wrote:
| The profit margin figure cited for grocers is the margin on
| their "main business" -- i.e. revenue on grocery goods sold
| minus cost of grocery goods from suppliers.
|
| But this ignores other ways grocers make money (at _much_
| higher margin) -- e.g. by charging their suppliers for
| shelf space /positioning.
| arcticbull wrote:
| No that's their total net profit margin as reported in
| the earnings statements.
| mostly_harmless wrote:
| It also ignores that they often own the suppliers.
| "Woops, our supplies raised the price, so we need to
| too."
| arcticbull wrote:
| George Weston Limited, the top-level entity that owns
| Loblaws and all subsidiaries has an even lower margin, at
| 2.9%. This should account for the entire umbrella of
| ownership, I believe.
| ziddoap wrote:
| That's overall profit margin, right?
|
| 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?
| gruez wrote:
| >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?
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _If they actually want to make a profit, surely it 'd
| make sense to price fix some value/volume item rather
| than something cheap like bread?_
|
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >I don't buy "incompetence" as an excuse for multiple
| vendors colluding on prices.
|
| 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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _I 'm not sure why you're going so hard on this
| strawman._
|
| You literally said: "choosing to price fix bread seems
| more like incompetence than evil villainy"
|
| Replying to that is a strawman? Okay.
| aga98mtl wrote:
| I believe it is an elaborate psyop to shift the blame of
| inflation away from the government and toward a boogeyman, the
| "evil" grocery chains. As you point out the margins are super
| tight in food retail, it is impossible for it to be the cause
| of inflation.
|
| 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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _I believe it is an elaborate psyop to shift the blame of
| inflation away from the government and toward a boogeyman,
| the "evil" grocery chains_
|
| 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?
| gruez wrote:
| As mentioned in the government report linked in the OP[1],
| grocery profits have only went up 1-2 percentage points.
| It's totally fair and justified to attribute that to evil
| grocery stores, but the rhetoric coming from politicians,
| journalists, or voters? Or is it something less nuanced
| like "greed grocery stores are driving inflation"?
|
| [1] https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/how-we-foster-
| competiti...
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| What does "caught colluding" mean? If it is some of
| Trudeau's stooges said so, I would not believe it for a
| second.
| ziddoap wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-
| fixing_in_Canada
|
| > _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!
| arcbyte wrote:
| Yes, it's still a boogeyman. The bread price increases
| still amounted to only an extra 1.50 per load of bread over
| the 15 year period.
|
| 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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _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.
| whycome wrote:
| Recently??
| ziddoap wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Investigation started in 2017 and there was a guilty plea
| and $50M fine issued in 2023.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Isn't it funny how large companies always get greedy at
| exactly the same time governments print a lot of money?
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Or when there is a govt scandal terrorists strike...
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >The average man will never ever realize that the monetary
| mass surged during covid while real world production slowed
| down.
|
| 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.
| dopylitty wrote:
| Inflation is caused by companies deciding to raise prices. It
| has nothing to do with government. Whether there's more or
| less money out there it's still the decision of the people
| running the company to raise prices or not.
|
| "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.
| Fervicus wrote:
| And Canada is already lowering interest rates.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Because one thing has nothing to do with the other? US school
| buses look like 1950s fossils, but it's not because their
| makers are swimming in money.
| 99_00 wrote:
| 1. Online prices are not the same as in store prices
|
| 2. No one, other than random people in messages forums, is
| alleging collusion or price fixing. No one at any university, not
| the government, not the media.
|
| 3. The government's investigation, which many of the conspiracy
| theorists site as evidence, shows a lack of competition led to 1
| or 2 % increase in price over 12 years, and the vast majority of
| the price increases was due to things like war in Ukraine, Covid
| restrictions, fuel prices due to energy crisis.
| throwaway201606 wrote:
| Want to give you benefit of the doubt with regards to phrasing
| but tackling each of these statements as they are all factually
| incorrect:
|
| > 1. Online prices are not the same as in store prices This
| depends but mostly they match ie online grocer prices in Canada
| are the same as in-store prices
|
| This is because most grocers have use online prices as flyers /
| ads / sales pricing for stores.
|
| Also, in Canada, because of price match policies from the
| grocers themselves, _most_ grocers have to match their own
| online prices and, in many cases, competitor prices - this
| includes competitor online prices!!! including sales and flyer
| offers
|
| https://blog.flipp.com/7-canadian-grocery-stores-that-price-...
|
| Further, there is - pricing law in Canada around charging more
| than advertised pricing
|
| https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/deceptive-marketing-pra...
|
| - a pricing code of conduct: if an item is more expensive than
| the listed price, the consumer gets that first item for free.
| This means that grocers go out of their way to show the lowest
| correct possible price all the time everywhere.
|
| https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/deceptive-marketing-pra...
|
| The only exception I can think of is delivery prices where in-
| store pricing will not match the online pricing. But delivery
| is usually differentiated by completely different branding from
| the actual store eg Sobey's has the "Voila" brand for delivery
| and Metro has "metro.ca" as the delivery brand which is
| distinct from Metro.
|
| > 2. No one, other than random people in messages forums, is
| alleging collusion or price fixing. No one at any university,
| not the government, not the media."
|
| This is factually incorrect: grocer bread price fixing /
| collusion went to court and there was a $500m judgement
|
| https://globalnews.ca/news/10642801/loblaw-bread-price-fixin...
|
| > 3. The government's investigation, which many of the
| conspiracy theorists site as evidence, shows a lack of
| competition led to 1 or 2 % increase in price over 12 years,
| and the vast majority of the price increases was due to things
| like war in Ukraine, Covid restrictions, fuel prices due to
| energy crisis.
|
| Price fixing preceded all these events. In cases being
| investigated e.g. bread which is now resolved, the period was
| as far as 15 years back.
|
| https://globalnews.ca/news/10642801/loblaw-bread-price-fixin...
| 99_00 wrote:
| 1. Your response doesn't seem to contradict my statement. It
| seems to add context. So my point #1 stands. Tracking online
| prices doesn't tell us what people are paying in store.
|
| Regarding the bread price fixing scandal, that ended 14 years
| ago. It ended when internal executives reported it.
|
| The current anger and activism is over the post Covid price
| rise in food. No one is saying that that is due to price
| fixing, or collusion. Except random people in forums or
| fringe bloggers with phds from unknown institutions.
|
| There is actual price fixing. But it is t the grocery stores.
| It's the dairy producers. But politically they apparently
| aren't a good target.
| lushdogg wrote:
| Email sent.
| hodder wrote:
| "Project Hammer aims to drive more competition and reduce
| collusion in the Canadian grocery sector."
|
| In order to assess collusion among Canadian Grocers it is
| important to understand what gross margins have done, as input
| costs have run up materially as well. Canadian grocer margins
| have expanded materially, but nowhere near total food inflation
| costs. While groceries remain a competitive business in many
| countries, concentration in Canada has led to a material
| expansion of gross margins since the early 2010s from the low 20s
| to the low 30s:
|
| https://ycharts.com/companies/LBLCF/gross_profit_margin.
|
| This is a massive increase in gross margins no doubt, and
| reflects the concentration of market power in Canada, but it is
| also important to understand that the total food price increase
| is driven primarily by food itself increasing in price (COGS for
| grocers) and general CPI in Canada. Meaning Loblaws is driving a
| bigger wedge to themselves, as are other grocers, but the bigger
| problem is general dollar devaluation and food input costs to
| grocers. It is important to look at both aspects of this problem.
| Right now if you magically waived a wand to reduce prices by 10%,
| while cost of goods sold remained flat, it would basically wipe
| out 15 years of gross margin incease to grocers, but would barely
| benefit families struggling to feed themself (an extra 10 bucks
| per 100 spent). So yes grocers are a problem, but they arent the
| problem that politicians (NDP and Liberals especially) scape goat
| them to be. Federal fiscal and monetary policy is MUCH more
| likely to be the main culprit to food price increases, and most
| politicians should be looking in the mirror as opposed to simply
| blaming grocers (who are also to blame, but lets use pareto's
| principle here).
|
| Date Value June 30, 2024 33.13% March 31, 2024 32.80% December
| 31, 2023 32.16% September 30, 2023 31.38% June 30, 2023 32.22%
| March 31, 2023 32.37% December 31, 2022 31.56% September 30, 2022
| 31.48% June 30, 2022 32.34% March 31, 2022 32.03% December 31,
| 2021 31.76% September 30, 2021 31.30% June 30, 2021 31.71% March
| 31, 2021 31.15% December 31, 2020 30.17% September 30, 2020
| 29.92% March 31, 2020 30.86% December 31, 2019 30.91% September
| 30, 2019 30.37% June 30, 2019 31.00% March 31, 2019 30.70%
| December 31, 2018 30.75% September 30, 2018 29.94% June 30, 2018
| 30.77% March 31, 2018 30.26% Date Value December 31, 2017 29.82%
| September 30, 2017 29.02% June 30, 2017 29.22% March 31, 2017
| 29.45% December 31, 2016 28.81% September 30, 2016 27.91% June
| 30, 2016 28.24% March 31, 2016 28.77% December 31, 2015 27.92%
| September 30, 2015 27.05% June 30, 2015 27.67% March 31, 2015
| 28.14% December 31, 2014 27.63% September 30, 2014 26.27% June
| 30, 2014 19.75% March 31, 2014 24.51% December 31, 2013 23.91%
| September 30, 2013 23.15% June 30, 2013 23.64% March 31, 2013
| 23.99% December 31, 2012 23.23% September 30, 2012 23.29% June
| 30, 2012 23.63% March 31, 2012 23.83% December 31, 2011 23.18%
| magicalhippo wrote:
| 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, the larger company had roughly the same amount as
| profit before taxes[2] in 2023.
|
| The recent heavy inflation in grocery prices has been far greater
| than what say the farmers got for the raw products.
|
| That said, here in Norway we have a ridiculous amount of smaller,
| local grocery stores, rather than fewer larger ones here and
| there.
|
| As I sit here, in the outskirts of Oslo, within a 15 minute walk
| I have 8 grocery stores, all from the top three.
|
| [1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/daglegvare-
| etterforskinga_-4_9-mill...
|
| [2]: https://www.dn.no/handel/resultathopp-for-norgesgruppen-
| tjen...
| jahnu wrote:
| I am almost convinced this is happening here in Austria too. I
| have to be open to the possibility it's just my imagination but
| damn it feels too suspicious at times. Haven't seen anything in
| the news, however.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| There's a whole thread here on Austria:
| https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071396799790275
| acchow wrote:
| For how many years did this collusion last? What percentage of
| their annual profit could be attributed to price collusion?
|
| 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Good question. I worked for one of them around 2005, and my
| boss mentioned price scouts then. As I recall it he wasn't
| happy about them, equating it with cheating.
|
| The allegations are that the price collusion really took off
| around 2010. We had had a few foreign companies trying to
| take hold, like ICA in 2003 and Lidl in 2004. Lidl faced a
| unified publicity attack by the big three, and didn't last
| long. ICA bought one of the then-larger chains, but couldn't
| make it work and gave up in 2015.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if the "big three" started working
| more closely together during the "Lidl invasion", and that
| that laid the foundations for further cooperation later.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Their reported profit margins are also super suspicious, TBH.
|
| Because the grocery chains have subsidiaries that are almost
| always the owner of the real estate where the stores are
| located. So they can just set the rent cost of the store in
| order to get whatever profit margin they deem acceptable.
|
| Then the real estate subsidiary turns around and spends most
| of their profits buying more real estate. You see it almost
| everywhere now, grocery subsidiaries buying up whole blocks
| of nice hhouses, just to demolish them and build ugly
| concrete cubes with yet another grocery store on ground level
| and stacks of tiny apartments on top.
|
| The best thing that can be said about these buildings, is
| that hopefully teachers in a few decades can use them as
| clear examples to show children just how bad it gets when we
| let rent seeking MBA fuckers decide things.
| coding123 wrote:
| It's not the grocery stores creating this environment, it's their
| suppliers that have been consolidating non stop for 10 years.
|
| This is the real story:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/...
| Marsymars wrote:
| TBF in Canada grocery stores are also suppliers; about a
| quarter of sales are of private label items.
| smeej wrote:
| 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."
| Lalabadie wrote:
| Canadian grocers already have sophisticated price watch tools
| all pointed at each other and augmented by human labor.
|
| 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.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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
| weakening the CAD against the USD to support exports that weakens
| purchasing power. the effort appeals to economically illiterate
| constituents who support "price controls."
|
| if you want to know where canada is on its de-kulakization
| spiral, the state is blaming "price gougers" for its policy
| failures, next are hoarders, speculators and probably
| "international bankers," on the list of cliches.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| People generally get the govts they deserve. Canadians are no
| different. i.e blame Canadians not their overlords.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| Can't it be both?
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Well yes, it can be both. But overlords are a)universally
| corrupt b) they are always a minority. The overlords have
| their way only because the majority allow it. You will see
| these dynamics even in tiny groups where the minority
| loud/obnoxious individuals rise to power.
|
| Focusing on the overlords is almost always a distraction on
| the underlying issue - that of the the electorate being too
| stupid, or ignorant to realize that they are being taken
| advantage of.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Wild that Costco can be orders of magnitude cheaper than the
| competition despite your defending of Galen's honour.
| dh-g wrote:
| I've never seen Costco be multiple orders of magnitude on any
| item. That would be a huge difference.
| adamomada wrote:
| This is the most laughable part, it means Costco has to be in
| on it too. And I can show they're not, easily: the prices at
| Costco are more than the grocery chains!
|
| They are colluding... to keep prices low
| gspencley wrote:
| Don't forget "trickle down economics." After collusion, price
| gougers, speculators, hoarders and bankers you always get to
| fall on "trickle down economics" as the convenient scapegoat.
|
| Unless of course you're a conservative. Then it's somehow
| always immigration's fault.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Yes, the US is no stranger to government influence on the
| prices of ag products, but my impression is that Canada is a
| couple notches above, especially the highly populous Ontario.
| Any comparison of the two needs to take that into account.
|
| Based on a brief look by my layman eyes, it does not seem like
| Canadian grocery chains are vastly more concentrated relative
| to the US. It's hard to compare because so many of the chains
| are owned by the same few brands, but this chart is helpful:
|
| https://www.howtocook.recipes/the-largest-grocery-stores-and...
|
| I'd look at the top ten and then ignore Walgreens and CVS. I
| think you've got 8 conglomerates serving the vast majority of
| the 330M Americans. (Unclear to me whether Target should be
| included; I don't know how much of the sales listed there are
| actual groceries.) The OP article suggest 5 conglomerates serve
| the large majority of the 38M Canadians.
| jfil wrote:
| 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...
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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.
| richbell wrote:
| > 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.
| aceofspades19 wrote:
| 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.
| surgicalcolor wrote:
| yeah this is some ideological nonsense.
|
| Loblaws and other companies have a lengthy history of illegal
| price fixing, monopolistic behaviour and other manipulative
| activity. Pretending that just more unregulated free market
| nonsense is going to help the situation is really naive.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _our agricultural products (dairy, wheat, maple syrup, and to a
| lesser extent retail beer and alcohols) are controlled by state
| monopolies who set prices._
|
| Every sane government uses taxes, to ensure food independence.
| A country needs farms beyond all else. The US does this on the
| back end, using taxes to shore up pricing. One method the US
| uses is "government cheese", where their federal government
| buys megatonnes of milk, turns it into cheese, then gives it to
| welfare recipients. By buying up surplus, the feds keep the
| price of milk up.
|
| Canada instead regulates milk pricing via quotas.
|
| Both methods involve keeping the price artificially high.
|
| The US follows suit in other markets too.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I read this title as "reduce collision in a Canadian grocery
| store" and thought this was an app for parking.
| winddude wrote:
| or shopping carts in the store, need to cut down on the number
| of sorries.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| No idea why people do not follow standard traffic conventions
| for right of way with a shopping cart (or while walking in
| general)
| scohesc wrote:
| It's honestly mindboggling.
|
| You're moving a four-wheeled vehicle down an aisle, with
| enough room for 2, maybe 2.5 cart widths. Yet people decide
| to stop right in the center without considering that they
| might be blocking someone.
|
| But I'm the jerk if I point it out.
|
| People are so silly (myself included)
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"It is an industry practice to have a price freeze from Nov. 1
| to Feb. 5 for all private label and national brand grocery
| products, and this will be the case in all Metro outlets."_
|
| Sounds like Metro just admitted to illegal price collusion to me.
| If this isn't illegal in Canada, perhaps the law is the problem?
| winddude wrote:
| Interesting idea, I'm also in Canada, I briefly looked at
| extracting grocery store price info, don't forget that prices
| from the same retailer can vary greatly by geo and even
| locations. Also several stores, in store prices don't match
| online prices (costco is the obvious example, but nearly every
| store has in store exclusives that don't hit online advertising).
| chaostheory wrote:
| Isn't the root of the problem Canadian protectionism? By law,
| it's near impossible to have new (foreign) competitors in the
| Canadian market. Same for industries like telecom.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| No laws against foreign grocers. Has been like shooting fish in
| a barrel for Wal-Mart and Costco.
|
| But we do protect certain specific industries to our own
| detriment (e.g. we've knee-capped dairy to the point that we
| hardly export any, while in the free(r)-market, we export 80%
| of our pulse crops, 90% of our canola crop, 3rd largest wheat
| exporter in the world).
|
| https://www.ecodainc.ca/pulses/
|
| https://www.ccga.ca/advocacy/trade
|
| https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/wheat/reporte...
|
| As with oil, we like to export raw resources and let someone
| else do all the value-add elsewhere. But hey, dairy is very
| water intensive and it's not like we enough of that to go
| around.
| jfil wrote:
| I believe one of the key issues is anaemic anti-monopoly laws
| and enforcement. The grocery sector in Canada is very healthy
| and innovative, even without foreign entrants.
|
| It's just that any successful small chains get eaten up by the
| giants - "Adonis" got bought by Metro, "Farm Boy" got bought by
| Sobeys and "T&T" got bought by Loblaws. Any new threat gets
| eaten up by the big players.
| a13n wrote:
| 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 big guys.
|
| As a result, they have crazy shitty experiences. Telecoms are
| frustratingly expensive for cable and mobile services. Banks are
| dreadful and charge fees left and right, for basic things that
| are free in the US. Customer support with any of these companies
| is terrible.
|
| I'm not surprised that they are colluding on pricing. It's quite
| obvious in the telecom market at least.
|
| It seems tricky from the gov's perspective because this
| oligopoly/collusion behavior likely fuels higher GDP and more tax
| revenue... but ultimately more competition and consumer
| protection would make for a better country to live in.
| FredPret wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| > there's a lot of technological change coming our way
|
| Could you give some examples of some technologies that might
| disrupt the status quo being referred to?
| VancouverMan wrote:
| 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.
| jfil wrote:
| There's a fascinating cultural history of accepting
| cartels/oligopoly in Canada. I've heard it described as an "Us
| Against the Vast North" attitude that prevailed as the British
| settled Canada.
|
| Also, I believe Canada's merger laws are very different from
| the USA's. We (in Canada) didn't check whether a merger is
| better for customers, the standard was to check whether it was
| good for shareholders. I believe this is changing with a
| modification to merger laws in the last year or two. It's slow,
| but change is coming.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Mergers have been challenged based upon free market
| competition for decades, and likely longer. Many mergers go
| forward with government imposed conditions.
| jfil wrote:
| Canada has something called the "Efficiencies Defence" for
| Mergers. My understanding is that it is used to push
| through harmful (to consumers) mergers by showing that the
| shareholders of the merging organizations benefit more than
| consumers are harmed. Therefore, the merger must go
| through. Truly twisted.
|
| https://www.theworldlawgroup.com/membership/news/government
| -...
| Fervicus wrote:
| > It seems tricky from the gov's perspective because this
| oligopoly/collusion behavior likely fuels higher GDP and more
| tax revenue... but ultimately more competition and consumer
| protection would make for a better country to live in.
|
| Or because the government is working for these oligopolies and
| not for the people, regardless of the color of their party's
| logo.
| jlos wrote:
| 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 pro-competition, and the law, which incentivizes
| consolidation."
|
| I think this strategy work well-enough until about 20 years
| ago. And by well enough I mean Canadian consumers weren't in an
| ideal situation, but things were good enough for most
| Canadians. Now the oligopolies have become basically predatory,
| gobbling up goverment funds and market capture wherever
| possible.
|
| Case in point: our Temporary Foreign Worker program (who now
| make up 7% of the Canadian population) have not only strained
| housing, healthcare, and the job market it has even been called
| a "breeding ground for slavery" by the U.N. [1].
|
| [0] https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/canada-
| monopolie... [1]
| https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g24/120/97/pdf/g24120...
| daedrdev wrote:
| Which is a self reinforcing cycle as the badly run Canadian
| companies need state monopolies to remain competitive
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| I don't think the temporary foreign worker program makes up
| 7% of the Canadian population (that'd be like 2.7 million
| people).
|
| To be fair it's actually very annoying to find what the
| actual number is, but this study covering up to 2022
| indicates that the number is probably no higher than 1
| million (https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/20230
| 10/artic...).
| rectang wrote:
| Interesting history! For the record, it's not like telecoms
| aren't an oligopoly in the USA, with the attendant "crazy
| shitty" customer service.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| ''' 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 investigation. Their data will be better
| than the data here.
|
| You can rarely _if ever_ prove these cases on the basis of data
| analysis alone. (Indeed if you could the world's antitrust
| agencies would just monitor such data! And anyone engaging in
| collusion would attack the monitoring adversarially - not that
| hard to predict!)
|
| In grocery data you will be looking at thousands and _thousands_
| of prices of different goods from different suppliers with
| different costs who are exposed to different shocks due to
| variation in the costs of their inputs or god knows what else.
|
| Not to be negative bc the idea is nice, but this is a complete
| waste of time.
|
| ~ an actual antitrust guy.
| jfil wrote:
| Hey man, I'm just creating the hammer - you can throw it in the
| lake, make a treehouse for your kid, smash a window, up to you
| :-D
| surgicalcolor wrote:
| 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 on cloud
| infrastructure. They maybe have legacy SQL databases being
| pulled into spreadsheets.
|
| So, while their data access might be better theoretically, I
| doubt they truly are able to even remotely analyze the data
| effectively. Data science in govt is notoriously poor outside
| of Statscan or other tech heavy departments.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| never underestimate a nerd with moral high ground
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| 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?
| adamomada wrote:
| There was a website a few years back that posted the prices of
| Brewers Retail (aka The Beer Store, single buyer of beer in
| Ontario) in a nicer, spreadsheet like format where you could sort
| by total price, price per mL, price per case size, etc etc (can't
| recall the name of it at the moment). It was great. And
| transparent, and just data.
|
| And were shut down by a threat of a lawsuit. Apparently you can't
| do that in Canada. They had some stupid fine print that said the
| data was theirs and you can't use it.
|
| And I seem to recall similar fine print in grocery flyers.
| sys32768 wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Publishing catalogue of prices of the products you sell should be
| mandatory condition to be able to do any selling.
| delichon wrote:
| 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 collusion? This project seems
| to build on an assumption that it is collusive to set prices
| based on other market prices, or else how could it be a hammer to
| bash collusion? Is it required to be ignorant of market prices
| when you set a price so that regulators can assume that
| correlation is evidence of an agreement?
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| 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 ideology of the
| society, loans and grants for new participants in the market,
| legislation that regulates pricing, specific taxation policies,
| or even rejecting the free market entirely and moving to
| central control.
|
| By analogy, a mysterious violent crime case might need to be
| solved for justice to be attained, but it doesn't need to be
| solved in order for a society to improve and make itself safer
| generally.
| smbullet wrote:
| Your premise is wrong. The point of a free market is to allow
| supply and demand to accurately determine pricing. It is not
| a desired effect of the free market for production costs to
| always correlate or even be close to the price of goods or
| services. Changes in supply and/or demand can cause costs and
| prices to trend in opposite directions.
| munificent wrote:
| I would argue that the "point" of a free market is that
| it's a system where participants find it worth
| participating because they reach their own goals while not
| having to agree on what the point is with any other
| participant.
| smbullet wrote:
| I 100% agree but unfortunately most people outright
| reject the moral argument
| bigthymer wrote:
| > The point of a free market in practice is to ensure that
| sale values are correlated with, and reasonably close to,
| production costs.
|
| Some free markets result in natural monopolies so they don't
| always cause sales values to trend to production costs. I
| believe the scenario you are thinking about is "perfect
| competition". A free market results in perfect competition
| when a number of other conditions are met, including, but not
| limited to low barriers to entry, and lots of buyers and
| sellers.
| jsbg wrote:
| > The point of a free market in practice is to ensure that
| sale values are correlated with, and reasonably close to,
| production costs.
|
| No, the point of a free market is to let the price system do
| its thing, and prices have nothing to do with production
| costs as long as they are higher. If prices appear to move in
| unison and that actually happens to be because of collusion,
| in a free market a new competitor could undercut the cartel.
| That's assuming that the cartel members themselves don't
| break the collusion, which they have every incentive to.
|
| The long-term impact of collusion on prices is limited
| compared with e.g. money printing and other sources of
| inflation.
| SG- wrote:
| 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.
| islewis wrote:
| Big fan of any data aggregation projects like this, especially
| with such a relatable theme.
|
| However it feel like the conclusion might be jumping the gun a
| bit. Instead of "Think there is collusion" -> finding the data
| top support the claim, maybe run the numbers first and see what
| they say? I think coming up with a strong position (Canadian
| stores are colluding) before looking at the data makes it
| enticing to find numbers that back up the claim, whether or not
| they are taken out of context.
| mb7733 wrote:
| We know they have been colluding, the question is on what other
| kinds of goods?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada
| islewis wrote:
| Thanks for the context. I'm still not certain that an
| instance of collusion on the price of bread in 2015 implies
| wider collusion in 2024.
|
| Ideally, the data would be proving this, but I guess my
| skepticism is the cost of making a claim before the research
| is done.
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