[londons_explore]

A big chunk of the problem is competition law preventing prices increasing in events like this.

Supermarkets in France just increase the price for tomatoes for a few months and pay suppliers slightly more to get the stock they want.

In the UK, competition law prevents jacking up the price during a supply interruption, meaning suppliers prefer to direct scarce goods to France instead, where they earn more. That makes scarcity in England worse.

[mmarq]

The UK: the place where it is never the fault of Brexit but there is always an obscure and self-contradictory justification for crazy things that started happening the day after Brexit and that never happened before.

Today is the turn of competition laws that, we are told, don’t allow supermarkets to increase prices - while food inflation is in the double digits.

[notahacker]

UK competition law does not prevent supermarkets putting up prices, and the Competition and Markets' Authority to intervene in cases of abuses of market power does not extend to UK supermarkets being banned from paying more for imports than French supermarkets

[msie]

Citation? I've seen two articles on UK price inflation and none of them mention this problem of competition law. Price inflation does exist in the UK.

[moremetadata]

[1] "According to the BBC report, the UK “imports around 95% of its tomatoes and 90% of its lettuces, most of them from Spain and north Africa, according to trade group the British Retail Consortium (BRC).”

Morocco has responded to the shortage claims by noting that the extreme weather that has been sweeping the country has had a huge impact on fresh produce."

>In the UK, competition law prevents jacking up the price during a supply interruption

UK Supermarkets have contracts with suppliers which are not brilliant, its how supermarkets have become the controlling middleman in the food supply chain in the UK, and as they also employ large numbers of people in the UK, some 2nd only to the NHS which is the largest employer in the world making the USSR seem febrile, they can hold the British Govt to ransom with employment figures, like one did in the 90's when Labour got into power.

Just about the only thing they have honoured in the past is the MOD orders for food get picked first at the expense of the store's orders, during the Balkans conflict.

If a law or regulation does not exist for some activity, it will be exploited if it can make the supermarket money and they are so slow paying, ignoring your supplier credit terms, typically taking 6 months to pay up. They offload admin costs onto you by making you submit your invoices into their systems, but you can pay for a more streamlined efficient way to submit your invoices as another example.

They are not alone though, all big businesses have their questionable tricks, and one of the major causes of these shortages is lack of investment in the supply chain for extreme weather, in this case cold weather that hit north Africa and Spain. The UK has been living too cheaply, through efficiency and lack of investment, something COVID also highlighted to the world with JIT supply chains.

Elements of the global supply chain had little to no redundancy built into it for "natural" events, which COVID highlighted and ionosphere heaters[2] continue to highlight under the guise of extreme weather events! [3] The science is out there if you want to be informed and not be fed your opinions.

[1] https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/02/354180/food-shortag...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater [3] https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=846f8785-9613-4...