“You opt for the lowest prices, for the sales. I am not going to buy beef, but the cheapest pork; I am not going to buy fish; I am not going to buy organic products”Bombard said.
“This phenomenon is here and it is deep and it has been gaining strength in recent weeks,” he told a panel discussion at French employers’ association Medef’s annual conference after the summer.
Carrefour and its competitors in the food sector have adapted to the new frugal mentality with promotional campaigns to freeze the prices of a series of everyday products.
Inflation soared to record levels in major economies over the past year, due to supply chain strains following COVID-19 and, more recently, soaring energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February.
Inflation in Carrefour’s home market, France, reached 6.8% in July, the highest rate since the country began using the European Union’s methodology to calculate data in the early 1990s.
France has shifted the cost of high inflation onto consumers more aggressively than other eurozone countries, capping gas and electricity prices and boosting incomes, with pay rises for civil servants and pensioners and subsidies for the poor.
At the same round table, the head of French bank Crédit Mutuel, Nicolas Thery, said that a new inflation regime is taking hold that will leave it well above the European Central Bank’s 2% target.
“I think we are going to have inflation around 3% or more,” Thery said, citing companies bringing factories back from abroad after the pandemic and the green energy transition as reasons.
Source: Ambito
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