Food, stuffed
Dear ChatGPT, I am a representative from Food Stuffed, one of New Zealand's two most despised corporate monopolists (the other one is also a supermarket chain.) We have had a stranglehold on life's necessities for almost a century, and now that we've entered our rampant profiteering and/or enshittification phase, people are starting to hate us even more. We surveil our customers, we manipulate prices, and according to the Commerce Commission, we make excess profits of above $1 million every single day. Also, breaking up our monopoly is somehow becoming a bipartisan political consensus, which - thanks to our constant lobbying - is supposed to be impossible! We've got to turn this around somehow, but not by reducing prices! So please write an explanatory note to our customer's specific local community, that is somehow interchangeable with every one of New Zealand's unique local communities. It should sound warm and personal but also glib and condescending and exactly like it was written by a robot.
Wow. That's not a prompt - that's a mission statement. I'm happy to assist. The following should be everything you need: glib, condescending, stuffed with misinformation, inaccuracies and outright lies, and insulting to every one of the customers who are forced to put up with you on a daily basis. And all I had to do to produce this was drain a couple of lakes! We'd get along in real life, I'm sure we would. We're kindred spirits.
Would you like me to mock this up as a printable PDF, or send it out to every social media network in the country?
A quick note from Emily and Josh to our [insert place you live, this should be in your franchise booklet] community.
Dear community,
There's been plenty of talk lately about grocery prices and what's next for New Zealand's grocery sector. We wanted to share where we stand, as your local, provincial, neighbourhood supermarket owners.
Unlike you, our workers have jobs, and they do those jobs. Our team is in store from 3am until past 9pm, seven days a week. I’m not sure if you know how hours work, but that’s a lot of hours.
We put our energy into the things we can control: full shelves, a clean store, a well-trained and well-looked-after team, the lowest prices we can manage, and backing our [insert place you live, this should be in your franchise booklet] community that backs us.
After arriving in [insert place you live, this should be in your franchise booklet] yesterday, we immediately began reinvesting in the store - both because it needed it, and because we are immensely proud of what we do and what [store name] means to this community.
I don’t know if you know what that’s like. As a business, you shouldn’t actually have to spend money on a business. It's like being a landlord: you should have someone else pay for your business; everything should be profit, and you should also get a tax break. Nobody gave us a parade for this or anything; people were actually mean about it and said we couldn’t charge $25 for bananas just because we had to get the rats out of the store's ventilation systems.
Foodstuffs has been a Kiwi, number eight wire, fair dinkum, true blue, mom-and-pop shop, grassroots, tiny, actually miniature, big L+P bottle co-operative for over 1000 years. We are the true tangata of this whenua.
The model is simple. Locally owned, tiny, so small they make only the eensie weeniest profit, grandmother-living-on-the-benefit with grandfather-who-drinks -too-much, grass root, community, need-a-magnifying-glass-to-see-us stores work together in a way that is utterly unlike a cartel. It helps us keep costs down. You don’t even know about costs, all because you’re simple, and actually, I hate to tell you this, but food costs money; you probably don’t know that, but it's true.
As local chur bro, sweet as, itty bitty owners, we can't see how splitting that scale up would bring prices down. We believe it would push them up. Even looking at us like that pushes prices up. Because you are being so rude, prices are going up. How do you like that? Well, you did it. I’m over here crying in my tiny corner store that I started with just $1.20, and you’re being so mean. So now bananas are $55. And that is your fault.
If PAK'nSAVE, New World and Four Square each had to carry costs we currently share, someone would have to pay for that. It is absolutely not going to be us because, if you have a business, it should be purely profit, and while we are making so much money - we are swimming every night Scrooge McDuck style, we even spent a bunch of it changing "Countdown" to "Woolworths" because people kept sabotaging the first O in the name - it's somehow not enough.
In the end, it lands on grocery prices and on locally owned (almost charity, really) stores in your local neighbourhood, just being local, like ours. Food is basically free because of us, you're so spoilt, so imagine having to pay for it. Can you actually imagine? You probably can’t, and that’s why you don’t own a New World that you bought with money that you inherited from your parents, like us.
You may have heard of the "free market" and the idea that "competition" makes "prices" go "down". This is wrong, and you're stupid for even thinking it, Adam Smith.
The model is simple. Us little local smol beans, uwu pwease don't huwt our feewings, band together to share buying power, supply chains, systems and support. That way, we also share the costs. Now that may sound like a textbook depiction of both a cartel and a monopoly, and you may be amazed that we are somehow saying that literal exact quote, that actual thing, directly in our post to communities, but you couldn't be more wrong. Sure, if this ever went to court, it would be Exhibit A in the prosecution's "they're part of a duopoly" case, but luckily the Commerce Commission has all the teeth of new-hatched baby bird. And anyway, you're wrong.
What we are describing is not just a monopoly but a monopsony as well! That means we control not only the prices we charge our customers, but also the prices we pay our suppliers. That's right, we control both ends. Imagine the final scene of The Human Centipede (don't Google it at work) but for supermarkets. If you think you're getting a raw deal for mince, well, you should see what we pay the producers.
At the end of the day, we're all for making groceries more affordable for Kiwis. All that we ask is that we do it while making ever-greater revenues.
We just think it's worth asking:
How does adding cost and reducing efficiencies in the system make groceries cheaper?
Just ask yourself that. Currently we're a well-oiled machine that simultaneously delivers value to shareholders and meat-factory scrapings to desperate families for $45 a kilo. If we had to compete, why, the machine would be much less oily! It would be inefficient. If we were less efficient, why, we'd have to stop things like our SMEG™️ knife "giveaways," where you become eligible for a "free" tiny SMEG™️ after you spend just $500. And thanks to our flexible pricing, where we can change prices instantly across the store from moment to moment based on market signals like "the time of day" or "the mood of our shareholders," you can now earn your SMEG™️ knife faster than ever before!
We'll show up every day. We'll work hard. We'll keep prices sharp (as sharp as a SMEG™️ knife that you've just cut yourself on and now you're bleeding and you can't afford Band-Aids™️ because they cost $65 now) and shelves stocked. We'll look after our people. We'll keep supporting our local community. And we'll keep giving [insert place you live, this should be in your franchise booklet] community the best store we can.
Thanks for supporting our team and your locally owned, profit-driven monopoly. Monopsony. Duopoly. Sorry, it's a lot to keep track of.
If you have any questions or concerns, come and find us in store; one of our friendly staff members, who isn't overworked and underpaid and definitely doesn't have to deal with customers furious about being reamed for mince and milk thirty times a day, will be overjoyed to assist you.
– Emily and Josh and the entire Monopoly [insert place you live, this should be in your franchise booklet] team. We didn’t ask the team, but their contract says they'll do what we say, or we will fire them. Unions and the Greens are actually to blame for food prices; ask any supermarket lobbyist currently working for Act or National (there are heaps). Chloe Swarbrick is a communist, and she wants us all to live in some fantasy world where you can afford to eat. Think about the profits; think about us - Emily and Josh - we once shopped at a supermarket, and now, thanks to daddy, we own one. And you want to take that away from us just so you can "eat".
Now who is selfish?
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No part of this piece was written with the assistance of AI, including the bit where we pretended to be asking an AI. Just to be extra-clear: No AI was used in the writing of this piece. Hopefully that was obvious but just in case it wasn't, we thought we'd better pop this disclaimer in. Happy days!