Would shareholders also All sorts read? Then you have just been treated by Ahold Delhaize to the highest dividend payment in years – hurray price increases, hurray generous share buybacks – and then you come across receipt on page 40. Cut out and put in the mailbox of the needy: “Dear Neighbour! Would you like it if I make you a snack sometime?”
Curious about the new Shellbode. We’ve made gas unaffordable, but here, a receipt to carpool with your neighbors.
Now in the Heinekengazet: shareholders are swimming in record profits, but your beer costs 5 euros. That’s why five tricks to avoid giving a round in the pub unnoticed.
Cut out for you, from the Vattenfallerhånde: „Dear Neighbour! Would you like to take a bath with me sometime?”
Pardon my French, but this is anyway let them eat cakes next level?
Would those shareholders squeal when they leaf through and come across all sorts of tips for cooking cheaper: “Use everything”. “Nice and affordable: By changing only one ingredient at a time, it looks like you are putting a whole new tray bake on the table.”
To tear you up. The slob learns to live like a student, and you dine royally on his money. In the same issue there is a report about a super sympathetic neighborhood project around shared soup. Post a picture of you #neighbor sign and you have a chance to appear in this beautiful magazine with your story. Become the unpaid mascot of this social money laundering operation.
In France and Spain there are supermarkets that offer an ‘inflation basket’ and freeze the price of thirty basic products (pasta, diapers) at an affordable level. For the time being, this is all done on a voluntary basis, and is accompanied by the necessary hassle, but those French and Spanish cabinet members are at least insisting on such a gesture from the business community.
With us they don’t even make a tentative proposal for something like that. You don’t have to expect it from the supermarkets themselves. Ahold CEO Frans Muller said against on Thursday The parole coolly that the groceries have become “much less expensive than everyone thinks”.
But the fact that government parties are not urging the supermarkets is unpalatable. A cup in it AD about the Binnenhof renovation read as an adequate summary: “Rutte takes the risk of an uncontrollable fire for granted and stays in Torentje for another year and a half, fire brigade ‘not amused’.”
There is only one person who could enforce such an inflationary basket. The one who is number one at all those multinationals. The shareholder. And because those probably sooner NRC than All sorts reads, he may best regard this piece as a cut-out receipt.
Christian Weijts writes a column here every Friday.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 17, 2023