Could publicly-owned grocery stores break Canada’s grocery oligopoly?
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Well as someone that has been doing a good chunk of grocery shopping at Giant Tiger, I say that this is a great idea.
And in the past months, I’ve found some Canadian produce at Giant Tiger when nobody else in the area had it. Specifically carrots.
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We don’t even need a whole grocery store. Dry goods at Canada Post locations could help offset groceries a lot.
Canada post doesn’t have a lot of their own locations any more. The majority are contracted locations within other stores.
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Nationalized Loblaws simple as that
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Given how our government seems to (dys)function, I’m doubtful that this would realistically solve anything. Government shops, with much higher employee salaries getting paid by taxes without any real public say in the matter, with another bloated set of “c-level” employees earning even more ridiculous amounts. We’d likely also see the municipal level people cashing in to top up their salaries by another couple $100k at least, to sit on a “regional grocery board”, sorta like what they did in metro Vancouver. “You want me to participate in meetings related to my job?!?! I’m gonna need more money!!”.
Public sector employment skyrocketed under Trudeau, to something like 1 in 5 working people in Canada being employed by the govt. The increases in wages for public sector employees was the primary driver of stats that said wages had gone up for Canadians post covid – which is extra funny, because public sector wages are paid via taxes, meaning private sector peoples wages generally stagnated, and their tax payments started providing less bang for the buck. And it’s often ‘shielded’ in the media – like BC Transit says stuff like they need more gov funding due to “Inflationary pressures”, but in reality its “because the public sector employee union negotiated larger YoY increases than is seen in private sector, so our budgets are all blown and we need more of that tax revenue”. You can see the compensation in their financial reports - over 80% of their HR budget is eaten up by staff earning more than the median salary in Canada (the median basically being their ‘entry level’ salary). It’s difficult to rationalize why driving a bus warrants a salary in the top 10-25% of the country. For low skill work in private sector, there’s basically a salary cap, and if staff want to go above it they need to change jobs / take on more responsibility – the business can replace the staff member with a more junior person, earning a more junior salary. It’s how you tend to need to manage your operating expenses. In public, that’s not the case as you can just keep going back to the public troth demanding more of that tax revenue.
I mean, hell, look at what’s going on in fauquier-strickland. A community with less than 500 people, and an operating budget deficit of 2.5 million?! That municipality is serving fewer people than my highschool graduating class from decades ago, yet they have an annual operating deficit of over 2.5 million… and it’s a fairly common situation for a lot of these smaller communities. And they’ve opted to go to the province for money, rather than increase taxes locally by ~$5k per resident to cover it. So everyone gets to share in the joy of inefficiency. The bloat’s absurd.
So we’d get unsustainable grocery stores staffed by people earning six figures to do entry level shit, increased tax burden and decreased gov services in other places to compensate.
Wages have to rise for the market economy with positive baseline inflation level to not collapse. You want others’ wages to also go up, not public employees’ wages to not go up. Someone else’s wage going up creates negotiating leverage for the rest to demand higher wage too. Most wages have little to do with skill or job difficulty and a lot to do with specific market conditions and leverages that people or firms use to drive wages up or down. And while you talk about certain public employees getting raises, you don’t consider the wage freezes for tens of thousands of nurses in Ontario that lasted many, many years and were only removed after a long legal fight. So things aren’t always good in the public sector and in fact there are more than a few jobs that are better paid in the private sector.
Public corporations are no different than private corporations in that they take money from people and they pay people to do work. Sure they take more of their income from taxes than Loblaw or TD, but that’s not fundamentally different than the subscriptions, commissions and prices you pay for things you generaly can’t afford not to pay. Of course most large private corporations also get paid from taxes in some part. But that’s not the interesting bit. People lower than the very top of the income scale spend most of their wages in their local economy. That’s the income of most local busenesses and the wages of their neighbours. Money collected from the profit margin of Loblaw disappears from the local economy of the store and it gets distributed to few at the very top of the income scale who own Loblaw. It disappears from the local economy geographically and functionally. It is not available to fund any other local business and labour. Of course thats even worse with Walmart where the money doesn’t even stay in Canada. With this framework in mind, even if the prices of a public grocer are the same as Loblaw, the revenue would be flowing through higher wages of employees into the local buisness owners and their employees. This is why the two are not the same and why you might want a well paying public grocer over a Loblaw’s.
Finally, at least in Ontario, the public LCBO stores are some of the best run retail stores and they’re a joy to be in. Interacting with their staff is typically great.
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Of course it will work. But it has to also do a publicly-owned distribution centre/network. Loblaw now owns a significant part the distribution side and independent grocers end up buying from Loblaw. This is a great hack that lets Loblaw say their retail margins aren’t that high, while making money before the products even enter the retail side. And of course it allows them to make money from smaller competitors.
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We have those in America already, they are called co-ops. This is the one in my area: https://www.honestweight.coop/ and https://www.niskayunaco-op.com/ . Mamdani’s proposal isn’t bold, it’s already been done, and there is no reason why they can’t be implemented in NYC.
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We have those in America already, they are called co-ops. This is the one in my area: https://www.honestweight.coop/ and https://www.niskayunaco-op.com/ . Mamdani’s proposal isn’t bold, it’s already been done, and there is no reason why they can’t be implemented in NYC.
This isn’t about co-ops
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I’m curious. Can I made a bunch of bread, sit just off NoFrills property, and gift a loaf to everyone who agrees not to buy bread from the store.
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I’m curious. Can I made a bunch of bread, sit just off NoFrills property, and gift a loaf to everyone who agrees not to buy bread from the store.
Technically yes, but I’m sure the cops would show up and charge you with mischief or something. Remember, the cops are here to protect the status quo, not to protect you.
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Terrible solution.
Break up and split the wholesale and retail operations. Legislate against wholesale pricing discrimination (Wholesale pricing cannot have price breaks which exclude smaller competitors)Why “terrible”? You got something against crown corporations?
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I don’t have a universal like or dislike of publicly owned companies. Expending limited resources and political capital on running a supermarket before trying any antitrust regulation is a waste of governmental resources.
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I don’t see what the backlash is about. A publicly owned store is no different from Costco, except everybody’s a member and there are no owners raking off prof-… ohhhhh, now I get it.
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But i heard the communist countries have fake grocery stores with plastic fruits just for show!!!
We cut out the middleman and put the plastic directly in the food.
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Co Ops are owned by the employees or customers/members depending on how they are setup. The article was implying it being owned by the local government like utilities and roads are.
The article shouldn’t be implying. It’s part of his platform.
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We have those in America already, they are called co-ops. This is the one in my area: https://www.honestweight.coop/ and https://www.niskayunaco-op.com/ . Mamdani’s proposal isn’t bold, it’s already been done, and there is no reason why they can’t be implemented in NYC.
they are called coops
No they are not.
Of course coops exist in Canada but it’s not the same thing
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I live in Toronto, I just do all my grocery shopping in Chinatown on Spadina and the surrounding area. so much cheaper, like insanely cheaper and better stuff too.
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I’m curious. Can I made a bunch of bread, sit just off NoFrills property, and gift a loaf to everyone who agrees not to buy bread from the store.
I think if you got the right license to be an artisan producer you would be fine, might need a permit to setup a tent or something.
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I don’t have a universal like or dislike of publicly owned companies. Expending limited resources and political capital on running a supermarket before trying any antitrust regulation is a waste of governmental resources.
Fuck Weston nationalize Loblaws. Boom running a supermarket made easy.
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I’m curious. Can I made a bunch of bread, sit just off NoFrills property, and gift a loaf to everyone who agrees not to buy bread from the store.
The penalty for illegal price fixing food like Weston’s Bread, should be nationalization into the public fold.
The Weston Bakery Empire and Galen’s yacht aptly named “Bread” should be public property.
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We need that in Norway.
