This is Vanese Ferguson with Coffee Talk. The food professor Sylvain Charlebois senior director for the Agri Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University suggests that retailers are buying enough inventory to cover several months of sales but negotiate a discount with the manufacturer. It only offers said product to customers at a discount for a limited time period while enjoying the profit for all the other weeks and months it charges regular price to the consumer. He suggests this practice means manufacturers absorb losses and then have to fight back with things like shrinking package sizes.  What I got from his opinion piece was that it’s not the manufacturer’s fault. Although ultimately consumers pay more. Um. seriously don’t care. I would think a manufacturer would have enough business sense to realize when offering a significant discount to the retailer can’t be sustained. Remember the bread price fixing scandal? It took whistleblowers. I mean if knowing the strategy be it those who regulate industry or the average joe – meant there was a way to make change then the whole bit between manufacturers and retailers would matter to me. With the bread price fixing, the consumer price index for bread, rolls and buns from 2001 to 2015 increased by 96 per cent according to Statistics Canada. The numbers were right there, and industry watchers didn’t sound alarm bells. Again, it was whistleblowers. I’m not sure knowing I’m getting screwed at the grocery store by retail greed is going make me feel any better when I have to pay the bill. Ultimately, we need industry watchers which have real teeth.