It’s quite simple.
In fact, I agree with the Retail Council of Canada representatives that food inflation has been politicized. To politicize food inflation, you use big numbers to represent profits in dollars.
For our part, we’ve published three reports on greedflation and we’ve shown that gross profit margins have remained roughly the same over the past five years. We believe this is an important metric to look at, because it’s about calculating revenues minus product costs. So, when costs change upstream in the chain, we see it. It’s a fairly clear indicator.
The other thing to consider is food product sales. Food products need to be separated from pharmaceutical and cosmetic products. Increases in food sales rarely exceed food inflation. There have been two or three cases: at Metro, it’s happened a few times, as it has at Loblaws. But generally speaking, over the past three years, it’s been very rare. So, these companies make a lot of money selling something other than food.