Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne says he’s ‘disappointed’ in the lack of transparency Canadian grocery store giants have offered so far when it comes to tackling food inflation. He’s sending a letter to Canada’s Commissioner of Competition to express his dissatisfaction.
Tax them > They increase prices to compensate > They sell essential products so people still need to buy
The only way you can break them is by creating a non profit crown corporation to compete with them.
The point of marginal taxes is to make it acceptable to turn a reasonable profit, but taxes get more and more punitive as profits go up, and thusly price gouging isn’t really worth the effort.
It still incentivizes making money but rather than taking those profits and grinding employees, suppliers and customers, you’re incented to invest that money back into the business. You can still make millions or billions in revenue and make a reasonable profit, but instead of Galenm, senior leaders and laerger shareholders making bank, the profits go either to wages, facilities or (if you don’t raise pay or invest) to the government.
This is, incidentally, how it all worked prior to 1980 or so, when we had a functioning social safety net.
Put it this way: if Weston is already a multibillionaire and still makes $300M/y in salary and comp, plus additional bonuses, then we’re not taxing Loblaw enough. Could they raise prices? Sure, they could, but why, because they don’t make enough billions yet?
Nuts to this idea of “if we tax them, they’ll raise prices and/or leave”. I’ve had enough of being blackmailed by billionaires. They need us to buy their stuff and back their wealth; we don’t need them. If, eg, Loblaw wants to raise prices to maintain unreasonable post-tax profits, someone else can step in and do the same thing and charge less, and Galen can fuck off.
We’re talking about essential products. No matter the price people need to eat so from the get go the “price gouging isn’t worth the effort” argument goes out the window.
99% of the products in a grocery store are not essential.
Essential foods are things like flour and oil and potatoes.
To miss the point by that much you must have done it on purpose
They make most of their money on luxury items and processed foods, not essentials.
It’s ok buddy, no need to reply anymore, you’ve proven you’re an idiot already, we get it.