Its probably evidence of excess market power and abuse of consumers.
In the UK that's "enforced" by the competition and markets authority.
The way it works is cma does a lame investigation, the regulated parties lawyers all 'prove' their clients did nothing wrong.
cma goes away.
cma did a review of supermarkets about 15 years ago, let them off scott free.
Now they're pushing it even further.
TBH for fresh fruit and veg and stuff there are still proper markets in most towns - so people going to supermarket are just lazy. SO I do partly blame the consumers here for not supporting a diverse economy.
That's essentially their defence to the CMA, the consumers do have options so it can't be abuse - they choose to give us market power because the consumers can't be bothered to shop around.
And there is something to be said for their arguments - they were given the market power by consumers - so the consumers are at least partly to blame for this situation. Consumers are benefiting from reduced shoeleather costs that may exceed the losses due to this.
CMA doesn't do sophisticated local market and transaction costs analysis though. I'm sure there are areas where price differentials exceed transport costs - meaning there is significant lack of local consumer choice. But it takes a lot of number crunching and fine-grain geographic data to prove. I personally think they shoudl take cars out of the equation and use public transport costs+time only to figure local market size - but that'd be easy for them to argue out of court. All they have to do is allow say a 30 minute drive, and generally that will mean there is no local market power concentration.
Babalugats@feddit.uk 4 days ago
Ireland. Shitty Government lets everything slide. They are about to take over the EU presidency, they are heavily lobbied by the US Big-Techs - Watch what they try to pass in regards to privacy (removing it) over the next 6 months.