When you control most of the market it works out a little differently. People can only eat so much food, but you can price gouge them relatively easily.

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kasey_junk 4 days ago | parent [-]

Kroger, the largest grocery in America and one that routinely sets of anti-monopoly interdictions have a profit margin of 1.76%.

What profit margin line would you suggest counts as price gouging?

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FuriouslyAdrift 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

And they do $150B - $200B of gross per year. It's a massive business. I worked at Kroger Central Marketing decades ago when they rolled out the savings cards (which was a way for them to raise prices across the board AND track purchases in real time per shopper) and the strategizing over milk prices for a 1/2 a cent per gallon change was insane.

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hansvm 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Doesn't that also count the investment losses they made last year, the cost of gobbling up other companies, the interest from the debt they acquired with previous expansionary practices, etc?

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kasey_junk 4 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, but you can run the numbers for basically every grocery in America. The industry considers 3% margins to be outstanding.

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hansvm 2 days ago | parent [-]

That reads more as an indictment against hyperscaled grocers than an argument that the current price gouging is unavoidable.

	▲	kasey_junk 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You can get the same numbers out of small scale grocers too. It’s a brutal retail business with low margins and easy replacement. It’s probably the last industry I’d look to for price gauging accusations. The typical argument against monopoly grocer situations is that they are problematic for how they deal with _vendors_ not customers.

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mattmaroon 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's crazy how narrow big retail profit margins are in general. What a brutal business.

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ac29 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Just to clarify, that is their net margin.

Their gross margin was slightly above 30% last quarter.

	▲	kasey_junk 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Grocery stores have lots of operations costs. Real estate, employees (Kroger employs ~400k people), cold chains, logistics, etc. Feel free to set the bar for price gouging via gross margin, but then you are just suggesting that you don’t want operational efficiency in grocery store price comparisons.