The discounted fruits and vegetables at my local supermarket sit on a single rolling rack that’s inconspicuously tucked away and dwarfed by its surroundings. The over-ripe apples and bananas might be good for smoothies and apple sauce, but I don’t think there’s a markdown big enough to take the slimy cucumbers — certainly not the 30 per cent off advertised on the sticker. I look at the prepared foods, big platters of salads also price-slashed by 30 per cent.
Early in January, customers noticed that the usual 50 per cent discount stickers on expiring items at Loblaw stores had disappeared, leaving only the less generous counterparts. Rumours circulated that the nation’s largest grocer was minimizing discounts on expiring items, food already earmarked for compost — a rare section of the supermarket where shoppers might find a real deal.
For a few days, this seemed like a conspiracy theory. A friend of mine spoke with an employee who told him it was a policy change, but the company wasn’t saying anything publicly.
When the company finally addressed the issue, it did so not through a press release or statement to a journalist: it emailed Sylvain Charlebois, the senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, who is a mainstay of research and punditry about the Canadian food industry — and has been criticized for carrying water for Canada’s top grocers against accusations of price gouging.
It’s an interesting bit of narrative control. The move gave Charlebois an opportunity to publicly criticize the company’s explanation (that it was adjusting discounts to be consistent with competitors) as suspiciously similar to price-fixing. It also gave Loblaw the use of a respected academic who is likely to be more sympathetic to the company than, say, a journalist would be.
Amid backlash, in less than a week, the company announced it would reverse course on the discount stickers (30 per cent stickers do, though, remain at my supermarket, and there’s nothing stopping the company from simply raising base prices).
Following Loblaw’s reversal, Charlebois sent out a newsletter titled “Thanks Loblaw. Over To You Metro and Sobeys.” He positions this snafu as a feel-good story, suggesting the free market as the moral arc of the universe. “Compassion and responsiveness to public sentiment can transform a misguided decision into a powerful testament of corporate responsibility,” he writes. “Loblaw's timely reversal of its discounting policy on expiring food reflects the enduring value of doing what's right, especially when it matters most.”In recent years, Loblaw has been a frequent defendant in the court of public opinion. There was the bread price-fixing scandal, the removal of “hero pay” pandemic wage bonuses, and the accusation that our nation’s grocers have been profiteering during a time of high food inflation, an allegation borne out by last year’s report from the Competition Bureau.
So it’s an odd time to demonstrate so little care about food insecurity, which affects 18 per cent of Canadians as of 2022, up from 16 per cent in 2021, according to the most recent report from StatCan. In Ontario (where the number is 18.7 per cent), those most affected include single mothers, Indigenous families, and Black families.
By the end of last year, food inflation had decreased to 5.9 per cent. That’s still triple the 2 per cent target of economists. Though the price of packaged food goods is predicted to ease as the costs of multinational food conglomerates stabilize, we are still expecting steep increases this year in the price of meat (5 per cent to 7 per cent), vegetables (5 per cent to 7 per cent), and seafood (3 per cent to 5 per cent).
As consumers, we are too obedient when it comes to those best-before labels. Good food gets thrown out, at the store and in our homes, because we trust that broad estimate of expiration more than our sense of smell. Discounting older food is a great way to reduce food waste and provide more access to fresh food for people who can’t afford it.
Part of what’s so strange about Loblaw’s initial response is not just the callousness of cutting off a source of food affordability, but also the explanation that they were aiming to mimic their competitors’ pricing. Aren’t competitors supposed to be in competition?
“In a perfectly competitive market, you expect some alignment around price,” explains Jennifer Quaid, associate professor and vice-dean of research at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law. If things are priced too low, you won’t be able to meet demand. If they’re priced too high, you won’t have customers. “You keep tabs on your chief rivals. You watch what’s happening, and you follow them. That’s called conscious parallelism. It’s not illegal.”
Quaid dismisses the idea that this is collusion, which is bad for the economy, undermines confidence, and distorts how the market works. Instead, she says, this may more rightly be likened to abuse of a dominance, which is when a small group of firms that have a high proportion of the market between them are able to act in ways that are anti-competitive.
And that’s the real, inescapable problem: a market concentration akin to what we see in the telecom industry. Canada’s top grocers maintain such dominance over retailing food — Loblaw, Sobeys, and Costco control 60 per cent of the market — that they don’t really have to care what the public thinks.
“I think what’s bugging people,” says Quaid, “is that these are big companies that are in a position to ignore consumer anger because they’re big enough.”
The solution seems obvious. Go back in time to the 1930s, when there was some momentum behind anti-monopoly legislation as the industry of food retail was evolving into the supermarket business we know today. (Everyone knows that Doctor Doom’s time machine — first seen in July 1962’s Fantastic Four #5 — is stored in the Fantastic Four’s headquarters, to be used at the discretion of Mister Fantastic.) If that seems like too much trouble, why not have a discussion about disarming these too-large companies and incentivizing independent grocers, as recommended by the Competition Bureau's report.
Or we can just accept that all our complaints and efforts are hot air — that we are captive consumers of these companies and have zero say in how they treat us.
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