Well good, fuck ‘em. Pepsi I mean. I had a gf who was obsessed with Diet Pepsi and the price has over doubled in the past few years. In 2020, you could easily find 2 liter bottles for $0.99, $1.25. Then they went to $1.75… $2.49… $2.99. You can still find them on sale 3 for $5, not not often or all the time. I’m pretty sure that the cost of bringing Diet Pepsi to market has not increased 300%.
It's two big conglomerates battling over money. This doesn't benefit consumers, it benefits the two giants.
If Carrefour gets a good deal by using it's shear scale, it will compete with smaller retailers who can't force a better deal. If it's doing this to Pepsi, imagine what it does to smaller business and farmers etc.
If Pepsi gets their price rise it'll increase its profits.
If they compromise halfway, consumers will ultimately still lose out.
I'm confused about why you guys think this is "funky" or something else is happening. FritoLay/Pepsi hiked prices on certain products, Carrefour wasn't happy about not being able to negotiate a different price point and they decided to hit back by discontinuing those products and very publicly adding PR signs blaming Pepsi for increasing prices to flex their muscle.
This is very unusual, but not that confusing. Inflation being caused by corporations rising prices unnecessarily has been a common narrative, large supermarkets have been blamed for it, especially when it comes to products like fruit and vegetables. Carrefour wants to make sure the manufacturer gets blamed instead of them. It helps that they have a very, very robust set of store brands, too.
What's a Quaker Oats? I guess they dropped it 1958 when they first opened, along with everybody else.
(Kidding, kinda, I have heard the name, but I couldn't tell you what you get inside a box or what you do with it. Eat it, presumably, but I don't know how).
It‘s worth noting that this has been going on for quite a while now in Europe. Two of Germany‘s largest retailers, Edeka and Rewe, don‘t stock products from quite a few companies like Mars, PepsiCo and Procter&Gamble anymore. Edeka even went to court with Coca-Cola because of their ludicrous price increases in 2022.
And both retailers haven’t shied away from making these issues very public. They‘ve often put signs into the empty shelves explaining the situation in detail.
They are obviously more afraid of having to explain those massive price hikes to customers, than they are of not stocking these products at all. Which, seeing how little the manufacturing costs actually increased while profits for the manufacturers surged, is definitely a good thing for consumers.