The glory of those self-solving problems

Time was when the British supermarkets were renowned for the fatness of their margins, the richness of their profits. So much so that the 1990s saw an investigation into what should be done.

BRITAIN'S pounds 60bn supermarket industry is facing another lengthy investigation into alleged profiteering after the Office of Fair Trading yesterday referred the sector to the Competition Commission.

The commission has been given 12 months to report on whether a monopoly exists amongst the supermarkets and whether they exploit that power against the public interest.

Note that was at least the second - memory dims as we go further back than that. No one did very much about it other than study the problem of course. Which meant it was all repeated near a decade later:

CONSUMER watchdog the Office of Fair Trading is to refer the role of supermarkets in the UK grocery market to the Competition Commission for an inquiry.

No one did very much about it other than study the problem of course. Good jobs with fat paycheques in studying.

And today?

Most seriously of all, the deep discounters Aldi and Lidl moved aggressively into the UK market, with a limited range, low cost formula that the big chains struggled to match. The result? Not much growth, and not much in the way of profits.

The fatness of those margins, the richness of those profits, attracted the greed - sorry, enlightened self-interest - of other capitalists. This competed away the richness of those profits, the fatness of those margins.

Which is how capitalist and market economies work.

We do indeed face problems in this vale of tears and yet by getting the basic system right we find that many of them are self-solving. Isn’t that lovely?