This Grocery Store Is Fighting Back Against Price Gouging

Shoppers in Europe have been warned that they can say goodbye to their favorite PepsiCo products. Between inflation, shrinkflation, and greedflation, France-based international retailer Carrefour has had enough.

"We are no longer selling this brand due to unacceptable price increases," read a sign hung in the snacks section of a Paris Carrefour store last week. "We apologize for the inconvenience caused."

Carrefour kicked off the no-PepsiCo campaign in France and then expanded the policy to Italy, Belgium, and Spain last week. This week, it added Poland to its no-PepsiCo list.

Lest you think this means people will simply be out one cola, PepsiCo owns a lot more brands than you might think, both food and beverages. These include (in no specific order) Lipton, Gatorade, Doritos, Cheetos, Quaker Oats, Aquafina, Tropicana, Kurkure, Naked Juice, Sabritas, Gamesa, Mountain Dew, and even the Frito-Lay portfolio of snacks.

This isn't the first time Carrefour has taken a stand against shrinkflation. In September 2023, the retailer created signage and put stickers on any products that had shrunk in size but kept the same price tag. PepsiCo caught Carrefour's ire in that campaign, too: An image in a report by Reuters showed signs calling out the PepsiCo's Lipton Iced Tea brand, caught in a shrinkflation loop of lower volume and higher prices.

As the Carrefour saga illustrates, the grocery chain is not here for product price increases and shrinking package sizes, and the intention of its refusal to stock certain products is to pressure suppliers to reverse course. France only allows price negotiations to occur within a certain window of time each year, and that deadline has been moved up this year under pressure to combat raising food prices.

Though Carrefour competitor Leclerc is still reportedly selling PepsiCo products, owner Michel-Edouard Leclerc took a strong stance against price increases in a recent LinkedIn post, saying in part that, "In the coming month, we must convince all those large suppliers who have made the mistake to increase their prices too much, to lower them now, or to moderate them."

James Walton, chief economist at the Institute of Grocery Distribution, told Reuters that French retailers are not afraid to let their unhappiness toward price increases be known.

"The French supermarkets, we know, are very, very ready to de-list people if they don't like the deals that they get," he said. "Obviously that's a last resort, because nobody wins if the goods that people want are not available on the shelves."

Of course, shrinkflation is happening to PepsiCo products here in the United States, too. Doritos bags have lost roughly five chips per bag, and Gatorade bottles lost four ounces of volume. Of course, shrinkflation wasn't, and isn't, just a PepsiCo problem, and it's unlikely we'll see signs like Carrefour's at our local Kroger anytime soon. Instead, we'll probably just have to take matters into our own hands.