I know that politicians are completely ignorant about everything not political or legal — and even then, they’re not especially bright — but Elizabethan ignorance on everything can only be truly appreciated by acknowledging her academic credentials. [/snark]
Even by her own heritage of ignorance, however, Elizabeth Warren’s latest broadside against Big Grocery must rank among her greatest cock-ups.
“What happens when only a handful of giant grocery store chains like Kroger dominate an industry? They can force high food prices onto Americans while raking in record profits.” Warren claimed that “a handful of giant chains” had replaced the wide selection of smaller stores that used to dot the American landscape, and she called for the use of the government’s antitrust power to “break up these giant corporations.”
Ah yes… let’s blame an industry for price gouging — an industry that traditionally runs on 0.75% net profit margins.
Remember, by the way, that while I know a few things about some things, and almost nothing about a whole lot more, when it comes to the supermarket business, I know everything about it. That’s not a brag, nor even an exaggeration; it’s what comes from close to a third of a century of experience in and around the industry.
So hear me now when I saw that Reason Magazine’s Joe Lancaster has it exactly right:
In actuality, for much of the last year, grocery stores have seen enormous boosts in revenue, but not increased profitability, for the simple reason that everything has been costing more: not just products, but transportation, employee compensation, and all the extra logistical steps needed to adapt to shopping during a pandemic. Couple that with persistent inflation—which Warren also recently blamed on “price gouging”—and it is no wonder that things seem a bit out of balance.
She is clueless, a fraud and incompetent. All she has is Marxist dialectic by which to formulate her idiotic positions on every topic under the sun — dialectic which when translated into policy has boasted a record of 100% failure — and the sooner the citizens of Massachusetts vote this moron out of office, the better the country will become.
