“Inflation won’t stop at the door of the stores because a distributor launches its own” anti-inflation basket, says a specialist in mass distribution

“Inflation won’t stop at the store door because a retailer has launched its own basket” anti-inflation, estimates Sunday March 5 on franceinfo Olivier Dauvers, journalist specializing in mass distribution and author of the blog Le Web Grande Conso. After System U, Carrefour will in turn launch its own basket from mid-March, as announced by its CEO in the columns of the Journal du Dimanche. It will be made up of 200 products sold on average at two euros, while it “there are 50,000 products in a hypermarket”, relativizes Olivier Dauvers. This retail expert sees in these operations a “image battle form”: “When they are faced with the inflation in which we are today, the best weapon of the signs is communication, to say that at home we are making more efforts than at others”he explains.

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Olivier Dauvers judge “Shame” that this take the form of various baskets specific to each distributor, rather than a single basket decided by the government. According to him, this risks causing “collateral damage to suppliers”. “When distributors want to lower prices, they have two solutions: either they lower their margins, or they renegotiate with suppliers; in general, they do both, or even a little more renegotiation”launches the journalist.

The retail specialist also reviews the various stages that led the brands to embark on the race for the anti-inflation basket, whereas at the start they “were not very warm to line up behind a single basket”, as originally proposed by the executive. Olivier Dauvers also recalls that the president of the FNSEA, Christiane Lambert, was also unfavorable to the idea “because she feared the consequences that this basket would have on the suppliers and the suppliers of the suppliers who are the farmers”. But the signs had “too much interest to cultivate [leur] price image, to show that they are in the field of the battle against inflation”so they decided to launch their own basket one by one.

“We will experience in a few weeks the same level of inflation as that which we experienced in several months last year.”

Olivier Dauvers, author of the blog Le Web Grande Conso

on franceinfo

Despite these anti-inflation baskets, Olivier Dauvers warns of a possible “Red March”. , notes the journalist. He claims to have calculated this weekend “ravioli inflation” and found that the price “boxes of ravioli increased by 70% over one year”. He recalls that “food inflation is extremely painful, especially for the most modest consumers, for whom the share of food weighs heavily in budgets”.