The Passover holiday just ended saw moderate food sales, and relatively high prices for most products. The main reason was the absence of price wars between rival supermarket chains around the country, with price competition being mainly local, on a small number of products, and lasting only a few days.
Sales of cleaning materials before the holiday were also low in comparison with previous years. "Customers have by now realized that they don't need twenty different sprays for windows, stoves, and so on; that they can buy one cleaning reagent that does everything they need," one retailer said.
Another retailer said, "Passover was weak this year in comparison with previous years. Shopping for the holiday was mainly concentrated in the last week, and for three strong days. Compared with last year, same store sales fell because of cannibalization between branches. There was a kind of tacit agreement between the chains not to go crazy with prices this year. Competition was not as strong this year as in the past. Perhaps there were twenty items at lower prices, but apart from that the shopping basket was the same.
"For example, last year there was fierce competition between Osher Ad and Rami Levy Chain Stores Hashikma Marketing 2006 Ltd. (TASE:RMLI), with Carmel Mizrachi wines being sold at laughable prices. The Carmel Selected series was sold to the consumer at NIS 14.90 a bottle. This year, it sold for NIS 24.90. Yehuda Matzos were sold for NIS 18.90 last year, compared with NIS 22.90 this year."
During the week of the holiday, prices in most retail chains rose, and the supply of products sold at bargain prices in the days before the holiday, such as fresh meat imported from Poland, ran down, and even disappeared from many supermarket branches. The Ministry of Finance announced that entrecote steak from Poland would be sold at a consumer price of NIS 80 per kilogram, but in fact by the intermediate days of the holiday there was almost no entrecote steak to be found at such a price, since the stock of Polish meat had run out.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 2, 2016
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