Let's talk about shampoo

One of the retail miracles in China are the unbelievable high prices of some products in the supermarkets here. I have quite some shopping experience in shopping malls in Western Europe and the US, but there you would always have a cheaper alternative next to the overly expensive branded products.
Especially for personal care products, but also for coffee, you pay in China a very high premium. At the beginning of this century I called myself for a few months a shampoo specialist, after I used it as a tool for the magazine Asiaweek as a tool to compare the performance of P&G and Unilever. The move was at the time especially not appreciated by Unilever, since they were losing what the editors aptly baptised as the "Shampoo War".
So, when I found in Carrefour this afternoon a bottle of shampoo for 4.1 reminbi (almost half a euro), I had to buy it. It was produced by a Shanghainese company called Mecen, a company I did not notice before. Normally Carrefour would seldom have standard bottles of shampoo cheaper than 20 renminbi (2 euro).
Are they going to undermine the cartel-like behaviour of the bigger brands? As most cost-conscious consumers might say: we hope so.