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During her election campaign, Kamala Harris has wanted to emphasize one of the strategies or measures she will carry out against ‘price gouging’ and price gouging by supermarkets. There is a big difference between fair prices in competitive markets and excessive prices that bear no relation to the costs of doing business’.
Harris will propose a federal ban on ‘corporate price gouging in the food and grocery industries’. In the official statement, the vice president emphasizes that these excessive prices are not related to the costs of doing business, and that Americans can see these differences in their grocery bills.
According to CNBC, the proposed ban is part of Harris’ broader economic policy platform, which she plans to share with the world on Friday during her campaign rally in North Carolina. Harris says she aims to enact the ban within 100 days of taking office if she wins the election and would instruct the Federal Trade Commission to impose ‘tough penalties’ on those who violate the yet-to-be-announced limits on ‘predatory pricing,’ the Washington Post reported.
Harris further plans to specifically target the U.S. meat industry and meat processors as ‘particularly egregious’ price-fixers, TIME reports. Rising meat prices have accounted for a large part of Americans’ rising grocery bills, even as meat processors posted record profits in the wake of the pandemic.’
Another of the measures will also try to alleviate the ‘shrinkflation’ phenomenon, which consists of reducing the size of products while maintaining or even raising their price. A problem to which Biden would allude at the time. ‘Bottles of sports drinks are smaller, a bag of chips has fewer chips, but they still charge the same.’ “And as an ice cream lover, the thing that makes me most angry is that cartons of ice cream have shrunk in size, but not in price.’ He added: ‘I’ve had enough of what they call shrinkflation. It’s a rip-off.
