Or perhaps “they”, the traders, can “set” the price wherever they feel like it. It’s not like any cheese traded today. Why couldn’t “they” bid 20 cents higher tomorrow? This is nothing but a sham of an exchange. Too think that most of the cheese sold in America is priced based on an exchange that has had two trades in the last month is absurd. To make it worse, this so called exchange also affects the price of milk sold in America. As the cheese market moves, so do milk futures.
What pisses me off is that it is the pizza shops getting screwed by this. The distributors don’t care. They raise their prices weekly and make a bigger profit on the old invetory in a rising market. In a falling market, you can bet they wait to lower their price until new inventory comes in. Manufacturers don’t care. They pay more for milk but sell cheese for more. I would bet they make as much, or more, on each pound of cheese. Because we can’t raise our menu prices weekly, we are the ones getting the shaft in a market like this.
There are only 3 things we can do.
We can complain and write letters to politicians, asking that the CME be investigated for unfair trade practices.
We can measure or weigh our cheese. If each one of us used 10 percent less cheese, it would affect the manufacturers and the distributors. It may even cause an oversupply of milk which might contribute to price decreases.
We can carefully examine our menus, raise prices where they need to be raised, and push items which don’t require cheese to try to remain profitable.
