2023-05-23 09:41:51
The Minister for Social Rights and the 2030 Agenda, Ione Belarra, has criticized Mercadona on multiple occasions for having profited by raising prices during the pandemic and, more specifically, to Juan Roig for being an unscrupulous capitalist who only thinks of making more money at the expense of citizens. Belarra never explained what he based his accusations on: as we have already stated on multiple occasions, Mercadona – and something similar can be said of the rest of the large supermarket chains – barely achieves a profit margin (before taxes) of 3.2 cents for each euro sold. If Mercadona enjoys million-dollar profits, it is not because its margins are very wide, but because it sells many merchandise units. Be that as it may, if it turned out to be true that Mercadona mistreats consumers, it would not be too understandable for consumers not to go to other supermarkets: what prevents them from buying in other places with much more affordable prices? According to the argument of Podemos, the main obstacle is none other than the quasi-oligopolistic position held by the Valencian company. But lo and behold, a few days ago we discovered that Minister Belarra is a regular consumer of a non-profit cooperative called “La garbancita ecógica”. In the words of the company itself: “La Garbancita Ecológica is a non-profit, Self-managed, Popular, Ecofeminist and Shared Responsibility Agroecological Consumption Cooperative of Madrid”. Well, given these characteristics (the non-existence of profit motives and the claim that farmers and consumers are the ones who win), one would expect that the supermarket model advocated by Podemos would be much more affordable than Mercadona. But not: the prices of the most basic products – milk, eggs, pasta, rice, oil or chicken – double, triple, quadruple and even five times those of Mercadona. How is it possible that Ione Belarra is scandalized by Mercadona’s prices and instead publicly puts La garbancita ecologica as an example of a store in which to buy? Well, because the problem of Podemos against Mercadona was never that it raised prices, something that they knew was essentially attributable to the rise in international costs. The problem is that they needed a scapegoat towards which to channel social discontent and at the expense of which to capitalize on votes.
#Organic #chickpea #Mercadona