He Ministry of Economy summoned representatives of the large supermarket chains with the purpose of analyzing the market situation and conveying the government’s disagreement on special promotions.
As far as he could know Ambit, the meeting would be in the next few hours with the Secretary of Commerce, Pablo Lavigne, and it is a continuation of the talks he held last week with the Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, with directors of mass consumption companies, called by supermarkets as “price makers.” According to the information, It is not ruled out that Caputo participates in the meeting.
Lavigne is expected to insist – as President Javier Milei and Luis Caputo did last week – on rdemand that companies lower prices in order to give promotions like “60% off the second unit”.
In the government it is understood that these types of promotions imply basically a price reduction They allege that companies believed in a disorderly inflationary scenario after the December devaluation.
It is what is called, a “overshooting”, a price increase much higher than necessary. Now, in the vision of the Casa Rosada, companies would be retracting due to falling sales. But consider that the promos They prevent INDEC inspectors from capturing the true prices.
The thing is that the agents of the collecting agency only take the price declared by the companies, and not the iimplicit that would result from the application of the discount for the second unit.
Although the idea of government andIt’s understandable and has a part of the truth, On the other hand, it must be taken into account that the super promotions They are not new, but come from several years ago and appear more than anything when sales drop.
More than a way to avoid price reductions, It is a mechanism to sustain sales in an activity like retail where the high turnover of merchandise is fundamental because the profit margins per unit are very low.
Among supermarkets it is suspected thatThe government requested For them to lower prices on the shelves it would have to do with what The process of disinflation of the economy is not as marked as expected.
In fact, this Tuesday the February CPI and some consulting firms barely registered a drop of a couple of points compared to 20.6% in January. We must remember that in December it had been December 25.5.
However, the impact that a kind of “whitewashing” of prices by the large supermarkets and the smaller ones could have on the general index would not have a great impact because through them Only less than 30% of the country’s retail sales are channeled.
That is to say, there is a universe of commercial chains, such as Chinese supermarkets and traditional neighborhood stores, which reach the 70% that remain outside the possibility of granting that type of aggressive promotions.
Source: Ambito
