Supermarkets operate at razor-thin profit margin. They locate so that they can attract customers to their stores. They need customers in order to sell their stuff and make money. The customers are free to go wherever they want to go shopping. It is not yet a government edict to shop in a government store. Leave the capitlistic system alone either to succeed or fail on its own. The current crisis is created by the goverment and its stupid policies starting with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and forcing them to buy up worthless mortgages that the government forced the banks to issue in the first place. I guess you will rather stand in line to get bread as the people in that workers' paradise called Soviet Union did not just that long ago.

My neighborhood has 3 close by supermarket chains; Giant, Food Lion, and Safeway. Each in competition with the others, attract enough customers to remain profitable in spite of Labor Laws, Minimum Wage Regulations, Taxes, Rent, Construction and Capital Equipment charges and a host of regulations far too numerous to mention here. Your world view is distorted, I dare say sick. The world is not full of victims, but rather independent individuals, each seeking to achieve their objectives through the best alternatives available to them at the moment. Government interference makes satisfying individual goals that much more difficult.

If you want a surplus of a good or service, mandate a price above current market prices, if you want a shortage of a good or service, mandate a price lower than current market prices.

Without economic freedom, political freedom is impossible.

Do you too consider a 150% mark up "normal"? Everyone knows that markets are quite imperfect (just look at the current crisis), and even more so concerning supermarket chains. How often do you see two or more supermarkets of different chains in the same neighborhood? You know, supermarkets are very, very "territorial", they are never too close to each other, knowing that their customers — should I say victims? will go shop to the closest one. There's little oversight over these obvious "territorial agreements", if any. Therefore, let's not lightly invoke the principles of the market economy to justify price abuse, even less in this specific area, where the "markets" get so exposed in their imperfection that a "corrective touch" by the authority is oftentimes more than welcome.

Anybody care to ask what will happen if ever we had to "borrow" from them ?