“That’s crazy”. Like his colleagues in large distribution, Michel-Edouard Leclerc denounced this Thursday the “enormous increases” demanded by industrialists in the framework of trade negotiations that must end on February 28.
“In sugar, there was already an increase of 22% last year, and today a supplier asks us for +53.82%, in addition to last year”, the boss detailed first. E.Leclerc focuses on RMC and BFMTV. Before giving the example of other average increases requested by manufacturers: +29% in flour, +23.55% in rice, +17% in tea, almost 21% in animal feed, +20.59% in canned fruit, +20.37% in condiments…
“I advertise these figures to tell providers ‘When you say (…) in the media that your increases are reasonable, I reply that the increases are not reasonable,'” Michel-Edouard Leclerc stressed. He later added that he could not “accept raises (…) that a clerk in a store cannot explain.”
“Unjustified” Increases
Five days before the end of the trade negotiations, Michel-Edouard Leclerc demanded “transparency” from the manufacturers. At the moment, the claimed increases “are not justified at all,” he lamented. Or, at least, “if they are justified, they cannot give us the justifications, they cannot argue”.
Michel-Edouard Leclerc also estimated that given the prices requested by agro-industrial suppliers in the framework of trade negotiations, “it is not March that will be in the red, but the second quarter.”
The price increases “will be passed on until July because they take four or five months” to go down on supermarket shelves, explained Michel-Edouard Leclerc. The new prices apply to new orders, when there is still stock available, it is at the previous price”.
If prices don’t rise suddenly, “consumers will still see a lot of increases,” he said, while Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Monday there was “no reason to have a Red Mars.”
Source: BFM TV
