Restaurant association complains about dairy prices

© AgMedia Inc.

Comments

You could say the dairy industry is frustrated by not having a say on restaurant prices.This was witnessed when the dairy industry gave a cheese discount to pizza operations and saw virtually no price changes to pissa consumers.
Agriculture on a whole can be frustrated with restaurants, whether it's beef, pork,grain or vegetable growers.l had a $7.50 salad the other day, l'm not the primary grocery shopper in the family but l would guess there wasen't 30 cents worth of lettuce and vegetables in that salad.
The restaurant industry hasen't had steady growth the last 25 years by "partially absorbing" food price increases.They have a list as long as a man arm of excuses why their prices have to be what they are but still will manage to grow by 3.8% in 2016 with sales over 62 billion, those are not the numbers of a unhealthy industry and aspecially not when more and more people are dining out than ever before.

The above poster is ignoring both sides of the equation in a rush to judgement - the observation that pizza prices didn't go down when fresh pizza makers got a price reduction in mozzarella cheese, is one sided and ignores any consideration of by how much the price of pizza would have gone up if the price of cheese hadn't been lowered.

The Canadian dairy lobby incorrectly uses the same argument when it claims that the price of milk didn't go down in Australia when supply management ended in that country, yet they, like the above poster incorrectly ignore any consideration of the so-called "null-hypothesis" or "placebo effect" which is an analysis of what would have happened to the price of milk if nothing had been done.

The above poster is engaging in the sort of analysis typically done by the NFU and seemingly adopted by every farm organization in what appears to be a defiance of sound statistical procedure.

Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON

The first rule learned in business is that "the customer is always right" which is, of course, a rule dairy and poultry farmers deliberately flout in supply management.

The only reason supply management lasted more than a minute is because there are:

(1) sky-high tariffs on the import of supply managed products
(2) effectively no substitutes for any supply managed products

Dairy and poultry farmers can charge whatever they want to charge and with no substitutes and sky-high tariffs they can, for all intents and purposes, except for cross-border shopping, get away with their price banditry.

Or, another way of looking at it is that, in Canada, approximately 12,000 dairy farmers have all the clout, 30,000 businesses (and 35.16 million Canadian consumers) that/who use dairy products have none.

Yet, only because they studiously ignore the multiplier effect of the adverse impact of high farm gate prices on the businesses/consumers of dairy and poultry products, the fans of supply management keep warbling that supply management is a "success" and can't figure out why supply management is not well-liked and will not be missed by:

(A) 13.6 million Ontario consumers
(B) 30,000 Canadian food service businesses
(C) every non-supply managed farmer who can't compete with the land-buying clout 200% tariff barriers give to supply managed farmers.

Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON

Post new comment

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
Image CAPTCHA
We welcome thoughtful comments and ideas. Comments must be on topic. Cheap shots, unsubstantiated allegations, anonymous attacks or negativity directed against people and organizations will not be published. Comments are modified or deleted at the discretion of the editors. If you wish to be identified by name, which will give your opinion far more weight and provide a far greater chance of being published, leave a telephone number so that identity can be confirmed. The number will not be published.