Thursday, 29 July 2021, 1:31 pm Are we paying too much for our groceries? Hmm. Is the Pope a Catholic? Given that the two Australian supermarket chains that dominate our grocery industry routinely rack up profits in the order of $22 billion annually, that’s a no-brainer. Yet as with New Zealand’s other socio-economic problems created by our 1980s reforms, the practical solutions seem pretty thin on the ground. As with banking, electricity generation/retail pricing, the fledgling telecommunications sector etc those hallowed “free market forces never really had a dog’s chance of functioning adequately in a country as small as New Zealand. Markets simply converged. What we