Letters | Are Hong Kong’s supermarkets having a big fat pandemic at taxpayers’ expense?
- Hong Kong’s top supermarket chains seem to have kept their government handouts but haven’t forgotten to mark up prices – by more than 200 per cent in one case

I presume they did do that, which is worthy of them, but I am more interested in the fact that they kept about HK$80 million, which is ultimately largely taxpayers’ money, and yet they seem not to have reduced prices one iota. In fact, despite obviously having benefited from the epidemic, they have made some prices, frankly, ridiculous.
I will give one example, but I’m sure your readers can supply many more. In the Discovery Bay branch of Wellcome, the price of a can of Heinz Beef Ravioli is HK$41. A quick search on Google will show that in the UK, the same can costs £1.10, the equivalent of HK$12, i.e., the Hong Kong price is an increase of more than 233 per cent over the retail price in the UK which enables chains there to make a reasonable profit.
The Hong Kong government is able to keep transport prices at an acceptable level – why not food prices, especially in supermarkets? If the example cited is anything to go by, even if prices were reduced by 40 per cent, chains here would still make a good profit, in spite of shipping costs.
