Government to target grocery hikes

The Development Ministry said it will unit supermarkets to show the archetypal shaper oregon manufacture terms – depending connected whether it is simply a caller oregon packaged merchandise – whenever terms increases are considered unjustified.

The categories that will beryllium selected each clip for the implementation of this measurement will effect from the terms trend checks carried retired by the Price Observatory and will beryllium defined by ministerial decision, and Minister Takis Theodorikakos told ANT1 TV connected Thursday this will beryllium included successful the ministry’s upcoming measure astir the caller Consumer Protection and Market Supervision Authority.

Through this regulation, the ministry seeks greater transparency successful merchandise pricing, and chiefly to enactment unit connected the intermediate links successful the supply chain, so arsenic to bounds the improvement of a merchandise reaching the support astatine a terms that is galore times what it is when it leaves the tract oregon the factory.

“The products for which there will beryllium the applicable work will beryllium those successful which unjustified terms increases are observed, which whitethorn conceal profiteering. We would not successful each lawsuit enforce connected supermarkets the denotation of the shaper terms connected each products, which would represent unnecessary bureaucracy,” Theodorikakos clarified to Kathimerini.

That announcement, however, seems to person surprised the marketplace erstwhile again, with representatives of the retail assemblage arguing that the measurement is chiefly for nationalist relations, while its implementation presents technical and applicable problems. They reason that it will fundamentally necessitate supermarket chains to uncover portion of their commercialized policy, which contention instrumentality forbids anyway.

There are products, such arsenic oranges, which spell done galore stages earlier being sold by a supermarket: The grower is paid for the oranges connected the tree, then someone other collects them and takes them to the packaging/processing plant, and then they are sold to a wholesaler earlier reaching the supermarket. As an experienced marketplace expert told Kathimerini, adjacent the packaging works is still considered to beryllium portion of the accumulation stage.