- with profits! Profits! Glorious profits! Money! YOUR money! The only difference between supermarkets and Uncle Scrooge McDuck is that Scrooge has a pang of conscience at the end of each episode and stops some of his exploitative behaviours..
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Lookit these updates! These are only selected updates that come to me via newsletters I'm subscribed to, not that I've searched for. (BTW at Teds News Stand there's a link to subscribe to my newsletter, hint hint...)
8 April 2024 Update: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/2024/04/08/supermarket-review-recommendations Some of my ideas are being applied - significant fines based on the egregiousness of their thievery.
20 March 2024 Update: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2024/03/19/divestiture-greens-supermarkets Finally the Nuclear option unleashed. Break the b*st*rds up and break their grip.
EVEN MORE UPDATE: Four Corners: these supermarkets are the gift that keeps on giving - if you wanted material to string them up by the privates, at any rate. The CEO of Wo - that one supermarket - walks out of his Four Corners interview because he heaped shit on a professional in the industry, and wasn't allowed to ask to have that bit edited out. Oh and then a few days later he conveniently resigns.
(Probably to get his golden handshake before he was pushed, but. And even though he claims it was planned all along, Wo - that place - obviously were NOT expecting him to resign because they're now scrambling because they had no succession plan. Sucks to be an incompetent money-pilfering slug...)
And the CEO of Co - the other place - adjusts their lipstick to "incandescent" setting, and bald-faced declares that they're not actually on a rocket ride of profits. How can you tell a ColesWorths CEO is lying? They just are. Always.
UPDATE 14/Mar/2024: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/03/13/supermarket-woolworths-coles-theft how the supermarkets are reacting to desperate people who resort to shoplifting to pay for supermakets' price gouging. I wonder how long this will last?
AND ANOTHER UPDATE!: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/02/11/coles-woolworths-senate-inquiry
UPDATED AGAIN AGAIN: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/30/supermarkets-government-profits This is becoming the spectacle of the decade!
UPDATED AGAIN: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/02/06/price-gouging-report
UPDATED: There may be some activity afoot. (https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/16/grocery-prices-inquiry) I asked in this older article whether the probe will have teeth, i.e. will it be able to actually compel the corporations that own the thieving supermarkets to act with humanity, and this update seems to suggest that the probe will get teeth. Unfortunately, legal action in a year is still a little bit too late for people already doing it hard...
You may know the back-story to this - over a year ago, meat producers (farmers, basically) got bent over and shafted, as the prices of meat were wound back by large amounts. I imagine this reduced their ability to purchase things, and because some fairly large communities' fortunes rise and fall in time with the primary producers, that starts to be a bit of a large number of people who suddenly have fewer dollars, while simultaneously their costs went up as supermarkets raised prices.
It's all very well to say "but they live in a farming district, they can get their meat / vegetables locally at farm prices" but you lose sight of a few factors there.
- The farmers will need to make a profit on their unsold meat animals.
- Most people in farming communities lack the skills to butcher and dress meat
- The butchers in those communities need to make money too.
- If the community is centered on meat, then vegetables and cereal products are still at the mercy of the supermarkets.
- Vice-a-versa in the case of growing districts. In their case, they need someone to process the grain and produce goods from it. The supermarkets again.And they're at the mercy for anything related to meat.
- Vegetable (market garden) regions are probably best off in one sense, but also their market gardeners need to make money so prices will go up when the prices they get from supermarket buyers goes down.
- On top of that many farmers/growers have draconian contracts with the supermarkets that prohibit them from sell surplus to third parties, many many many penalty clauses, and so there are a lot of things they can't do even if they wanted to... It sucks.
There's unfortunately not much that many people can do about that - "food deserts" are engineered into local planning by design, making it hard to get anything but fast food or some supermarket foods. It means the fast food places and the supermarkets have a huge customer base that doesn't have any alternatives.
It's also down to some selectivity by sellers, of course. You'll find upmarket grocers and butchers and bakeries in upmarket suburbs, because there, they will get the prices they need in order to stay profitable. Same with farmer's markets etc - if they're set up in a suburb that has two McDonalds, two KFCs, a Hungry Jacks, and four chicken fast food places, they don't do well.
Jaks Sisko in Star Trek focuses this problem perfectly - he cooks his own meals because he considers them superior to the replicator-generated meals - but where does he get his ingredients? Wouldn't that also be from the replicator?
So people shop at supermarkets where the growers and suppliers have been stretched to the limit to supply nutritious food but - under that kind of financial stress, they can't afford to do all the things that would be needed to make the food truly nutritious. That kind of farming requires far more land, land that can be regeneratively and ecologically soundly managed, and even then the soil will lack some of the nutritional components needed to make the produce truly nutrition-packed.
Even if you go to farm gate stores, they're still in the same situation, so whether they sell it to the supermarkets or to you direct, it's still no longer what it was. The world population is showing the effects of slow nutrition deprivement.
But the story I'm showing revolves more about the sheer extortion supermarkets are engaging in at the moment. They've always found ways to extract more dollars from a given kilo of produce, but now they're just going "fuck it," and charging extortionate prices.
I can think of one way to end that, but it's not pretty. We could also end it by boycotting those supermarkets for a month or two, but as mentioned, that isn't an option for anyone wanting to feed a family unless they have their own homestead or farm, or access to farmer's markets and farm gate stores.
The other way is for farmers to void their contracts with the supermarkets and only sell direct to the public or to independent grocers and stores. And they can't afford to do that because of the logistics involved.
Also, automated local vertical farms can produce many of the vegetables and fruits within their local suburbs, but this is a) unlikely to be profitable for the first five years or so until it starts hurting the big supermarkets and people get used to them and b) - come on! This would be like living in a colony ship or a colony on another planet with carefully-maintained agriculture and a limited range of produce, and this is supposed to be our home.
But there's also the other way - write to your local Members, to the ministers responsible for finance and food security and anti-competitive practices by corporations and let them all know that you'd like them to use their powers to fix this piracy. Start petitions or sign them, have meetings with others in your suburb, decide on some action before food becomes unaffordable to you, too. And trust me, it can easily happen.
Okay, we're "down here." What's going on? My wife is facing a life/death medical issue and I'm spending as much time as possible with her, caring, being there.
That does mean that I'm not doing as much writing, which means fewer posts, fewer announcements on social media, fewer people's eyes being directed to the blog suite. You can help me out though - share this article, follow the (newspaper icon) link to the News Stand and share that on your social media too. This should bring a few more readers, and with luck, a snowballing effect.
You can also help immensely by making a donation, either one-off or periodically, as that will allow me to pay online / running costs rather than taking away what little income we have.
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