You get robbed at gunpoint, you know you're a victim of a crime. Your bank account is emptied by scammers, you know you're a victim of a crime.
A chocolate bar costs a nickel more, every time you buy one, for seven years. How can you tell you're being ripped off?
If revenge is best served cold, it seems that price fixing is best served sweet, with cocoa, sugar and milk.
Canada's Competition Bureau has charged Nestlé Canada, Mars Canada and a distributor called Itwal with fixing prices between 2002 and 2008.
Hershey Canada is expected to plead guilty for its role in the alleged scheme. It seems that Cadbury Adams was the initial whistleblower that tipped off the competition cops to the scheme.
Nestlé and Mars are planning to defend themselves vigorously, they say.
They had better prepare two layers of defense. First, they'll have to hire some good lawyers, since if it is true that their former co-conspirators have turned on them, there should be evidence aplenty.
Second, they should build themselves some high walls, maybe a moat, throw in some piranhas and machine gun nest with interlocking fields of fire.
It's hard to get upset about an abstract crime like price fixing. It's very easy to make that less abstract when you say "You were being robbed every time you got a Three Musketeers at the gas station."
I'm frankly amazed that an angry mob hasn't descended on the headquarters of the key chocolate companies in question and torn the executives limb from limb.
Perhaps it's because Canadians are more or less civilized folk, and we're waiting for a trial and a verdict.
Frankly, for people keeping me from my junk food, I think death is too good.
Five years in jail is certainly too good. So let us consider some special punishments that might be appropriate for people working in the chocolate industry, if that guilty verdict is handed down.
First, we're going to need some really big vats.
The kind you usually see in action movies, where they're filled with acid and the hero dangles above them, hanging by his fingernails from a catwalk while the villain tries to stomp on his fingers.
(Note to self: If ever in an action movie, just don't follow the villain into Acids, Molten Metals & Sharp Saw Blades Inc. Just burn the building down from the outside.)
We'll be filling these vats with chocolate. Not the good stuff, mind you, not the pure Belgian chocolate, carefully crafted into fine truffles by skilled chocola-tiers. Nope, we're going for the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff here, the kind of thing that's reconstituted from old Easter bunnies that were left in the "50 per cent off " bin a month after the holiday was over.
The stuff you find at the bottom of your kid's Halloween bag after all the candy corn is gone. The stuff that's 95 per cent wax.
Any executive guilty of price fixing has three choices. First, they can go to jail and stay there until we get bored of watching them suffer.
Second, they can be banned from eating anything other than unsweetened grey gruel for the remainder of their days.
Or, third, we get a crew of oompa loompas to dip them head-first in the chocolate, pulling them up again only when they're as thoroughly coated as a chocolate-dipped ice cream cone.
This process will be repeated until the chocolate begins to harden. Then the executive will be propped up and left to dry. We may chip in some air holes if we're feeling generous.
Then the entire mess will be sold, at fair market value.
Matthew Claxton reports for the Langley Advance.
