Retailing giants miss deadline to agree freeze
Major retailers yesterday failed to show up at the Commerce Ministry to sign an agreement to freeze their expansions for 30 days as promised, saying that the prospective agreement would adversely affect their operations.
Although the ministry had set the deadline for the superstore companies to attend the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to temporarily halt their expansions, none of them - including Tesco Lotus, Big C, Carrefour and Siam Makro - showed up. Earlier, all of the major retailers except for Tesco Lotus had agreed to sign. Siripol Yodmuangcharoen, director-general of Internal Trade Department, said he was disappointed with the retailers for showing no interest in making concessions to mom-and-pop retailers. "This is one of the country's significant problems. Large enterprises should help [the ministry] solve the problem, yet they only care about themselves," Siripol said. The department will soon meet with the ministry's permanent secretary, Karun Kittisataporn, to devise new measures for addressing the effects on small business of the expansion of giant retailers in small communities, he said. The department decided to act against the retailers after thousands of small retailers last month complained that they were losing business to multinational hypermarkets, supermarkets and convenience stores. Siripol said he had waited until 6pm for representatives of the retailers to show up. Five companies said their representatives in Thailand had no authority to sign the agreement, two said their executives were abroad, and one failed to contact the ministry. Meanwhile, the largest members of the Thai Retailers' Association, including Tesco, Big C, Carrefour, Siam Makro, Power Buy, Robinson, Central, 7-Eleven, Foodland and Watson, wrote to Karun and Siripol explaining why they had failed to show up. They said the MoU would affect their companies' future plans and that the agreement was short on details, even though some of the clauses in the MoU were acceptable to them. They recommended that the ministry set up a working group consisting of government officials, consumer-protection agencies, small community retailers, representatives of modern retail chains and the academic sector.
Petchanet Pratruangkrai, Kwanchai Rungfapaisarn The Nation
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