Several independent, family-owned supermarkets across the North Island yesterday independently experienced independent pricing errors at independent but identical times.
The errors, which affected presumably-independent prices at New World supermarkets, were not thought to be connected, as each supermarket was owned and operated independently of each other, as was made clear by dozens of near-identical but independently-published Facebook posts by supermarket operators last month.
The affected stores are all independent members of Foodstuffs North Island, a co-operative of independent supermarket owners, not to be confused with Foodstuffs South Island, of whom they are independent.
This independent co-operative provides centralised purchasing, distribution, marketing, technology, and land-and-building-owning services to its independent members, while still allowing them to compete independently with each other through tactics such as temporarily not being able to sell things on a Monday afternoon.
These services, sources say, are vital to allowing the supermarkets to operate independently, because otherwise they would have to do those things themselves, independently.
It is understood that the independent errors originated in one of these shared systems, meaning that the supermarkets did not make the errors independently, but instead independently received errors made for them by somebody else. It is unclear if that party was acting independently.
The incident comes just weeks after supermarket owners independently raised concerns about proposals to break up the Foodstuffs co-operatives, which they argued could undermine the independence of their family businesses by forcing them to operate more independently, threatening the independence of their dependents.
In particular, each is independently responsible for providing independent profits to its owners, understood to be “mum and dad”, but different, independent “mum and dad”s.
It is not known whether any of the supermarkets would have experienced the error if they were dependent.
Supermarkets are called that because they market soup.