Didier Duhaupand is angry with the deputies. It is not the question of pensions which irritates the president of the Mousquetaires-Intermarché, but a bill which aims to regulate more severely the negotiations between industrialists and large distributors. These ritual scavenger battles, which must end on the 1er March, are usually bloody, but this year they are likely to be destructive, given the inflation that is eating away at the margins of all players. And in this game, it is the strongest who wins and manages to pass the mistigri of the price increase to his neighbour.
The three major distributors, Intermarché, Leclerc and Carrefour, have mastered it, in the name of defending the purchasing power of the French. To counter what the boss of Intermarché considers a scandal and a “encouragement of inflation”they use an unstoppable argument.
The government cannot, on the one hand, spend hundreds of billions of euros on tariff shields and other checks of all kinds and, on the other, prevent traders from buying at the best price to sell as cheaply as possible. .
End of abundance
Yet it is the somewhat schizophrenic exercise in which power is engaged. Since the pandemic and the invention of “whatever the cost”, the State aims to come to the aid of both the consumer and the producer. He has protected the purchasing power of the French, blocked energy price increases and is now trying to respond in the same way to industrialists. He is worried about the energy bills of bakers, like that of aluminum factories. Beyond that, the Minister of Energy, Bruno Le Maire, intends to make 2023 the year of the reindustrialization of France, through its ecological side, of course. While restoring the accounts of the nation, somewhat degraded by all these policies.
When the President of the Republic mentioned the end of affluence, he may have had in mind his pension reform project, intended to restore financial balance, but perhaps also the increasingly uncertain compatibility between protection purchasing power and business support. To complicate the equation, since the surge in inflation, consumption has fallen and the sectors that are suffering the most are those directly linked to it, in particular retail trade.
This employs nearly 13% of the workforce in France, ie the equivalent of industry. As shown by the numerous failures in recent months, from Camaïeu to Toupargel, this sector is extremely weakened, which is confirmed by the Bpifrance survey on the morale and financial state of SMEs. Holding all the threads of the web will become more and more difficult.