I’ll just leave this here.

The general public has been insane to play its part in the phenomenal growth of the supermarkets, we have effectively backed the development of something that though depicted to us as being a competitive, is in actual fact a cartel of the top four supermarkets and in nature operates on price fixing.

They make their profits in their buying departments, the buyers are gods in the operation and in the majority the most ruthless and arrogant individuals you will ever meet in the workplace and I state this from hands on experience working in the supermarket trade and having daily dealings with them. They drive down supplier pricing with absolute power due to the stranglehold they have in the market over suppliers and its not unusual for them to take on suppliers, consistently drive them down until little or no profit is left in the process for them and then discard them once they have been bled dry. If someone were to allege that within that sector of the business there may exist a rather large opportunity for dubious business practices, such as the possible insistence that a supplier to them must source certain materials they use in their process from specified supplier rather than their own and at considerable extra expense in doing so, or that possibly suppliers could find themselves feeling they needed to provide shall we say financial inducements that may not appear in the contract details„„, My response would be that given the power weilded by the buyers, the stranglehold the big 4 have on the market place and the resultant great need the suppliers have in dealing with them„„„ it would be far from impossible that those kind of practices could exist…….

The supermarket chain that I worked for had a very substantial amount of outlet, all of which were operating on an average gross turnover of approaching £700,000 per week and consistently year on year was seeing gross profit of the whole organisation rise by between 8 - 11% per annum without fail, yet one year that I was there whilst making over 9% growth on the previous year it made wage cuts to a sector of its staff whilst doing so and they were far from earning a great deal before being cut.

If the general public even knew a fraction of how the supermarket trade operates, saw the mark-ups being made between purchase from supplier and eventual cost to the public at the checkout, kept an eye on the year on year rise in gross profit of these organisations whilst also keeping an eye on the increase in the average food bill which rose last year by a figure I believe somewhere in the region of 18%, they may just click on to the fact that while competitiveness and value for money for the customer plays a very high PR profile in their advertising campaigns, in the real day to do running of the business has little relevence at all.

by Da1e_Martin

(Source: independent.co.uk)