European Supermarket Giant Drops Pepsi and Lay’s Over Price Increases

I swear I've seen this news multiple times across three social networks and not once was the title not fucking clickbait.

It's Carrefour. Carrefour dropped Pepsi. Carrefour.

Fuck modern journalism 🙄

If you're not familiar with European grocery stores, you'll have no idea what Carrefour is. "Supermarket Giant" makes sense to everyone.
- All they have to do is add one word. "European Supermarket Giant Carrefour Drops..."
- You aren't wrong though they could mention both that and the name, but headlines are largely written to drive clicks rather than to inform these days.
- Well ... They are in Latin America and Asia... on top of Europe so...Just not not North America ... So... I guess Carrefour still makes more sense considering the annoyance.... It's the scale of Walmart fyi.
Carrefour is a supermarket giant in Europe. So the title isn't off.
I'm a pretty savvy American that has been to Europe many times and I've never heard of Carrefore.
If I said Kroger or Safeway, you'd probably not know that they were grocery store chains here.
- They're everywhere in France. I like going to grocery stores when I'm traveling because it's fun to see what other countries have there, and it's fun to try random things. Plus you can save money on restaurants.

Well good, fuck ‘em. Pepsi I mean. I had a gf who was obsessed with Diet Pepsi and the price has over doubled in the past few years. In 2020, you could easily find 2 liter bottles for $0.99, $1.25. Then they went to $1.75… $2.49… $2.99. You can still find them on sale 3 for $5, not not often or all the time. I’m pretty sure that the cost of bringing Diet Pepsi to market has not increased 300%.

About a year ago I was at a grocery store and bought one of those 473ml bottles of pop at the till. It rang up on the till as $2.99
I told them to remove that, it's ridiculous, went to the pop section, and got the exact same 2L pop on sale for $1
- Oh yeah, small bottles in convenience sizes are absurd. Same for water. You can buy 1/2 a quart for $2.00 or an entire gallon for $1.50.
Are there extra taxes on sugarly drinks in EU countries?
- It seems they do in individual countries but not EU-wide. Not very much though, it says an average of 7.5 cents a can.

PepsiCo is in the find out part of the fuck around.

The "fuck around" part was in September when Carrefour started putting stickers on products saying they were being affected by shrinkflation, and had shrunk in size while increasing in price
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/14/carrefour-puts-shrinkflation-price-warnings-on-food-to-shame-brands
If course PepsiCo were too fucking arrogant to listen.
Never, ever fuck with the French 😂
I hope you're right, seeing the current prices.
Seeing how a bottle nowadays is well over €2, but i remember my teenage supermarket job when my manager explained to me they pulled this with coca cola as they wanted to increase the price from €1,15 per bottle to €1,35.
I think we all know how much effect that had.
- I haven't bought cola in a long time, but if a bottle of Pepsi is actually now the same as a bottle of microbrew beer that is nuts.
They already went through this two years ago in Canada with Loblaws and it only lasted about 2 months.

Pepsi owns Frito-Lay, so I wonder what else is going on behind the scenes? And did Carrefour also drop Quaker Oats?

It's two big conglomerates battling over money. This doesn't benefit consumers, it benefits the two giants.
If Carrefour gets a good deal by using it's shear scale, it will compete with smaller retailers who can't force a better deal. If it's doing this to Pepsi, imagine what it does to smaller business and farmers etc.
If Pepsi gets their price rise it'll increase its profits.
If they compromise halfway, consumers will ultimately still lose out.
- It pushes own brand which has much better margin.
- How aren't lower prices a benefit for consumers in principle? (Leaving aside specific questions about health and that Pepsi is overpriced anyway.)
And did Carrefour also drop Quaker Oats?
Yes. As well as Lipton, 7Up, Doritos...
Came here to say this. That said, they own a lot of other things too, so there’s something funky happening.
- I'm confused about why you guys think this is "funky" or something else is happening. FritoLay/Pepsi hiked prices on certain products, Carrefour wasn't happy about not being able to negotiate a different price point and they decided to hit back by discontinuing those products and very publicly adding PR signs blaming Pepsi for increasing prices to flex their muscle.
  This is very unusual, but not that confusing. Inflation being caused by corporations rising prices unnecessarily has been a common narrative, large supermarkets have been blamed for it, especially when it comes to products like fruit and vegetables. Carrefour wants to make sure the manufacturer gets blamed instead of them. It helps that they have a very, very robust set of store brands, too.
What's a Quaker Oats? I guess they dropped it 1958 when they first opened, along with everybody else.
(Kidding, kinda, I have heard the name, but I couldn't tell you what you get inside a box or what you do with it. Eat it, presumably, but I don't know how).
- It is an American brand of oatmeal. You cook them to make a porridge.
- Oats are the main ingredient in muesli and granola. And there's also a milk substitute made out of them. Avoine if you speak french.

Good, their products will rot your body and teeth. Then they just raise prices for no reason? Fuck them and stop stocking their products.

Don't worry, their competitor product, that would be chosen over them anyway because of the price, will also rot your body and teeth all nice.

Now lets do this in USA.

How can that be profitable for Frito-Lay?

It's not. They fucked up.

They're both the bottom barrel of junk food.

It‘s worth noting that this has been going on for quite a while now in Europe. Two of Germany‘s largest retailers, Edeka and Rewe, don‘t stock products from quite a few companies like Mars, PepsiCo and Procter&Gamble anymore. Edeka even went to court with Coca-Cola because of their ludicrous price increases in 2022.

And both retailers haven’t shied away from making these issues very public. They‘ve often put signs into the empty shelves explaining the situation in detail.

They are obviously more afraid of having to explain those massive price hikes to customers, than they are of not stocking these products at all. Which, seeing how little the manufacturing costs actually increased while profits for the manufacturers surged, is definitely a good thing for consumers.