From B le Vesconte.
IT was with some amazement that I read (JEP, 15 May) that the Jersey Hospitality Association are claiming that the global food crisis and GST is the reason that food prises have risen so markedly recently.

I also saw with some anger the photograph of a smiling chief executive of the Channel Islands Co-operative Society announcing record profits for their last trading year, profits which have, at least in part, been attained by blatant profiteering and I will give you just one example.

Prior to the introduction of GST a cooked chicken could be purchased at Co-op Grand Marché for the sum of £3.99. A quarter chicken cost 99p and half a chicken £1.98. Following the introduction of GST a cooked chicken went up to £4.28 which represents GST plus 17p or 4%.

As a regular purchaser of such items imagine my consternation when, on 14 May, I bought half a chicken and was charged £3.18, an increase of 59%. In similar vein a quarter chicken has risen from 99p to £1.59, a corresponding 59% increase.

Efforts to extract an explanation from the store management have been fruitless. The best they could offer was that the prices in respect of cooked chickens had not risen in three years. That I accept but, as I pointed out, if they increase the price of a cooked chicken by only 4% why do they find it necessary to increase the portion prices by 59%?

And so I say to the JHA stop blaming external pressures for your price increases which are applied by local traders to enhance their annual profit margins and to Mr Hopley I would say that with those trading practices I am amazed that Co-Op profits have risen by only 22%.

Come on JCRA, let’s get Tesco, Sainsbury’s or Asda in here as soon as possible and start giving the local resident a fair deal.
Brilei,
Mont Fallu,
St Peter.

Jim Hopley, chief executive, Channel Islands Co-operative Society, replied:
IF your correspondent had studied the detail of your report on our results carefully he would have seen that they referred to a trading year ending 13 January 2008 (many months before the introduction of GST). We are indeed proud of the figures that the loyalty of our member/customers and our staff has enabled us to achieve. With rapidly increasing sales in 2007, combined with tight cost controls, we were able to improve our performance significantly.

In a Co-operative context, this is not total profit but ‘surplus before distribution’ to the benefit of our Channel Islands member/customers (NB we are a 100% locally owned company controlled by our 100,000 plus Channel Islands customers). These results enabled us to return over £6.5 million to these members based on our 2007/8 turnover with all residual monies being retained in the business to fund our further development programme.

‘Profiteering’ is not a word we understand as our total responsibility is to our membership (the people who own the business).

We were as careful as possible with the introduction of GST to ensure that 3% precisely (to a rounding up and down matrix) was applied to all 30,000 lines in our product ranges across all our stores.

Inevitably, the introduction of GST threw out a very small number of anomalies in our current price structures, and indeed cooked chicken was one of these, and roughly at the same time as the introduction of GST we did adjust retail prices (driven by escalating costs). Perhaps we could have been a little more sensitive and carried out these adjustments well clear of 6 May.