Who Really Pays at the Checkout?

Supermarkets are staging a pantomime again. The bosses of Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and the rest have written to the Chancellor wringing their hands about the terrible injustice of business rates and muttering darkly that food prices will rise if taxes go up. It is the corporate equivalent of leaning on the price gun while staring you in the eye and saying it pains them more than you.

The first rule of supermarket lobbying. Whenever anyone suggests they pay a fair share towards the society they depend upon, the PR department immediately shouts that the poorest will suffer. They don’t mean it. They have simply learned that invoking struggling families is the quickest route to a government U turn.

Here is what they do not shout about. Tesco’s profits are nudging three billion pounds. Lidl’s profits have tripled. Sainsbury’s shareholders are not crying themselves to sleep. When energy costs surged and the war in Ukraine pushed food inflation off a cliff, margins tightened for a while, yet the big grocery chains survived. Somehow they did not go bust because Greggs was paying business rates.

The supermarkets want you to believe that a modest property tax rise leads automatically to higher prices. It does not. They choose how much to pass on. They choose whether the burden comes from shareholders, executives, landlords or the customer at the checkout. Claiming inevitability is simply refusing accountability.

What is really driving high food prices. Climate driven harvest failures. Fertiliser and fuel costs. Brexit’s endless paperwork circus. Global supply chains tying themselves in knots. All inconvenient facts that big retailers prefer to stuff quietly behind the bargain bin. They would rather wave a Budget document and pretend it is Rachel Reeves who made tomatoes expensive.

And here is the worst of it. Low income households feel every tiny rise. These are the families who do not have a “trimming luxuries” category. When prices creep up, they skip meals. The same supermarkets telling us they care about the poor will happily squeeze those customers dry to preserve executive bonuses and investor dividends.

If the supermarkets genuinely cared about struggling households, their letter would have said something radical. We will protect food essentials. We will absorb the increase. We will use our scale to shield those who have no cushion.

Instead, they effectively said. Raise our taxes and we will take it out of your hide.

The Chancellor faces a grim reality. Fourteen years of Conservative misrule hollowed out the state. Public services are wrecked. The debt is high. She must raise money or continue the decline. If she chooses to raise taxes on hugely profitable retailers, that is entirely defensible. The test will be whether she also protects those with the least by uprating benefits properly, expanding free school meals, and keeping staples zero rated.

Because here is the truth stripped of PR spin. Higher taxes do not have to hurt the poor. Treating the poor as a human shield for corporate profits definitely does.

So the next time a supermarket CEO claims they are “fighting for the customer,” remember who they actually fight for. The boardroom. The shareholders. The glossy advert budget. Everyone except the family at the checkout deciding whether tonight it will be beans or nothing at all.