Heather du Plessis-Allan: Countdown price freeze helps them a lot and shoppers just a little

We’ll have to give Countdown a little bit of credit here.
A price freeze is definitely better than no price freeze during a cost of living crisis.
But I think buy now we’ve realised that this price freeze is not quite as great as it looks, right?
First, it doesn’t actually reduce the burden on shoppers very much.
A price cut would mean that your grocery bill would come down, but a price freeze is just going to keep your grocery bill as high as it already is.
A price freeze just locks in the profits that Countdown’s already making on those items and it locks in those profits for the possibly the next three months because that’s apparently how much supply supermarkets will already have on their books on that price.
So Countdown probably already knows that the price freeze will not hurt them much at all for the next three months, therefore they can afford to do it.
Secondly, I’m not entirely sure if you’ve looked through the list of these products, but they’re not necessarily the highest priorities for squeezed shoppers, I would’ve thought.
You will know, having walked around the supermarket by now, that fresh produce is the thing that you look at and go ‘jeez that’s expensive’, that’s eye-watering expensive at the moment, but there are only three vegetables on the price freeze list.
You got pumpkins, potatoes and carrots. Carrots, by the way, are a winter vegetable so you would’ve thought that they’re actually going to come down in price in the next three months and probably don’t really need a price freeze.
How many different types of canned tomatoes do you think you need as well when you go shopping? I don’t know about you, but I stopped counting when I got to about five.
Apparently, they haven’t frozen the price of any toilet paper, nappies, toothpaste, soap, definitely things that people will need to be putting in their shopping baskets.
I know this sounds incredibly ungrateful at the moment, it’s not intended to sound like that, it’s simply to point out that yes Countdown has done a good thing here, but no it’s not as great as it looks.
And absolutely, it’s mainly PR. I’m guessing that what they’re doing is trying to quell shopper’s anger at the rising cost of food that the Government is blaming the supermarkets for.
And they’re probably also trying to get ahead of the Government’s announcement which is expected later this month on how the Government plans to shake up the supermarket duopoly.
So that in a few weeks’ time, Countdown can point back at this moment as evidence that they are trying to do the right thing by shoppers, that’s what is going on here, I think.
In truth, yes this price freeze helps Countdown a lot, and it helps supermarket shoppers just a little.

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