Carrefour Chief Executive Alexandre Bompard said economists' debates about when inflation would peak were futile, and what mattered was consumers' new, entrenched penny-pinching approach to shopping. He said Carrefour and its competitors in the food industry had been adapting to the new frugal mindset with promotional campaigns to freeze prices on a range of everyday products. Inflation in Carrefour's home market France hit 6.8% in July, the highest rate since France began using European Union methodology to calculate the data in the early 1990s.