Field Report- The Big Squeeze
Darlings.
A fox reads the newspapers. Not every fox does — most of my brethren prefer to get their intelligence from bins, hedgerows and the occasional intercepted chicken — but yours truly has always kept an eye on the broadsheets. Old habits from my days as Geoffrey Archer's typist (the less said about that the better).
And so it was, mes choux, that I found myself choking on my breakfast this Monday morning when I read that the Treasury — His Majesty's actual Treasury — has been leaning on the supermarkets to cap the prices of essentials. Bread. Milk. Eggs. The basics, darlings. The things people need to live.
Now. On the surface this sounds rather noble, doesn't it? Government stands up for the common shopper. Supermarkets agree to hold the line on eggs. Everyone feels warm and looked-after. Toodle pip, crisis averted.
Au contraire, mes choux, au contraire.
Because here is what this fox knows about supermarkets — and I have been rummaging through their bins for considerably longer than most — when a supermarket is asked to freeze a price, it does not reach into its own magnificently stuffed pockets to cover the difference. It reaches down. Down through the supply chain, past the processors, past the hauliers, all the way down to the person at the very bottom. The farmer. The grower. The producer. The one who was already hanging on by their fingernails.
Tesco's operating profit has risen from £1.8 billion to £3.1 billion in four years, darlings. That is a seventy-two percent increase. Lidl's profits are up two hundred and ninety-seven percent. And yet — and this is the part where a fox's ears go flat — research has shown that farmers receive less than one percent of the profit on a supermarket product. For a loaf of bread, the cereal farmer's profit is less than a tenth of a penny.
Un dixième d'un penny. You couldn't buy a crumb with that, let alone bake one.
So the government asks the supermarkets to freeze the price of bread, and the supermarkets — bless their cold, fluorescent-lit hearts — will smile, agree, and quietly shave another fraction off the pittance they pay the person who grew the wheat. The Treasury says it has 'sought assurances' that farmers won't lose income.
Sought assurances! Darlings, I once sought assurances from a Cornish hen that she wouldn't make a fuss and look how that ended.
Do you know what was offered in return for this voluntary restraint? The government hinted it might ease packaging regulations and delay rules on healthy food labelling.
So: the supermarkets freeze the price of eggs, the farmer takes the hit, and in exchange the supermarkets get to carry on wrapping everything in plastic and postpone telling you what's actually in your food. Quelle honte.
This is not a plan to help people, mes choux. This is a plan to look like you're helping people while making absolutely certain that the people who actually grow the food carry the cost.
So what does a fox do?
A fox buys from the people who grew it. Directly. Without six middlemen, a distribution centre in Warrington, and a pricing algorithm deciding that the dairy farmer can survive on four percent less this quarter. A fox looks the producer in the eye — or, in my case, peers at them from behind a bramble — and pays them what the food is worth.
Because every time you do that, darlings, you are opting out of the squeeze. And that, mes choux, is the most radical thing you can do with a dozen eggs.
Toodle pip.
R.
X
PS — To the Treasury minister who described this scheme as 'not about price caps': darling, when you ask someone to cap a price, it is — by definition — about price caps. This fox may live in a bramble but he does own a dictionary.
