no name notes from a grocery store
the politically charged landscape of canadian grocery stores
On a Sunday morning in February, I find myself making a solo trip for our weekly groceries. I’m at Zehr’s, a Weston/Loblaw-owned supermarket, because it’s closest in proximity and the one with the aisles I’m most familiar with. I’ve told myself many times that if I have the layout of a store memorized, the trip will be much shorter, even if I’m saving less than I would at a Food Basics or No Frills (time and money, right?).
I have a short list in hand, written on a slip of paper that my husband placed in my boot so I wouldn’t forget it (which is warranted, as anyone who knows my absent-mindedness can attest to). I’ve already bemoaned that there aren’t any cool shopping cart racks to hang my reusable bags on (like the grocery-Blockus-champion checkout guy at Costco taught me how to). I’ve started out through the produce, which then flows to seafood, butcher, processed dreamland aisles, bakery. As I make my way through, I grapple with knowing how tight I am for money right now: between jobs, between pay, and at the point where we’ve run out of pretty much everything in our food stock (when you don’t even have rice or olive oil). There’s a loaf of bread with freezer burn, some fudgesicles that only our friend Nick eats when he comes to visit, a swig of orange juice, and something in the back of the fridge that might have once been mint leaves. I’m not totally sure.
It's alright, food comes first. Everything else will fall into place soon enough. Food comes first.
I hadn’t said this in a long time, and it catches me off guard. The last time I thought about this was during the beginning of the pandemic, knowing full well that my teaching contract would end that April and that there was nothing lined up after, but if I stocked up on peanut butter and jelly then Rey and I would be fine for a long time (and we were).
So, I repeat this to myself over and over now, as I weigh the value of 10 packets of oatmeal at 100g for $10.99 or 8 packets of oatmeal (also 100g) for $6.99. I see if I can find fresh Brussel sprouts that might be cheaper than frozen (there’s not, but I grab the fresh anyway to treat myself). The mental gymnastics of which commodities are cheaper than others, and which stores are the better ones to go for produce, meats, or grains has become so common place that there’s an inherent understanding (albeit one that lacks patience) for those behind us waiting for their chance to mull the price of Brussel sprouts.
Grocery Store as Political Landscape
Every single move in the grocery store feels political, charged, angry these days. I roll through the meats section and hear an announcement ushering security to aisle 10. By the time I’ve gotten to the nuts and crackers on my list (a grocery store hour, but likely a ten-minute period), there have been four more calls for security in separate aisles. The entrances have had metal gates and turnstiles added to them to prevent us from leaving with full shopping carts, which feels like an action that asks grocery store clerks to police the public for minimum wage and very little job security themselves.
There are displays with No Name Brand items, grossly neon yellow against black letters telling us which foods we should all be able to afford: chicken noodle dry soup mix, apple juice, and dry pasta (pictured above). A veritable winter picnic for all Canadians to enjoy in the thundersnow storms we’ve been getting.
The rage builds inside me each week I take another trip in, only to find a new display or addition to the store that reminds us all that the food inflation is beyond our control. But this one, displayed so proudly as if doing a favour or trying to trend with younger generations and show that the Westons get it felt particularly insulting. As if the consumer is in on the joke, that it is “cool” to be experiencing a recession, and that food security can be commodified in a new way.
Yet this isn’t new and has been an intentional practice for quite some time across many public grocery retailers in North America. A friend of mine guided me to a 2016 report by the Centre for Science in the Public Interest called Rigged: Supermarket Shelves for Sale.
Within it, researchers chronicle the hidden manipulations that occur across the marketplace, such as the backroom deals between stores and food manufacturers that shape the display and structure of a grocery store layout:
[One] element of the modern-day grocery store is the “category captain.” In this bizarre system, a grocery store lets one big food manufacturer decide the entire layout of a section of the store that it already dominates, such as snack foods or soft drinks. One insider put it this way: category captains determine “everything from where and how products are shelved in supermarkets to how much of a product the supermarket should buy to whether a competitor’s product should see the light of day at all.” - Rivlin, 2016 (Rigged)
Additionally, the price of displays can be in the millions or billions of dollars:
Payments that food manufacturers make to retailers influence which products are offered and how they are displayed. Ultimately, those placements help drive what people buy. Companies spend billions of dollars so that their products are featured and promoted in as many places as possible and in the most attention-getting places in supermarkets, influencing what people purchase and eat. First are the steep “slotting fees” that stores regularly assess manufacturers seeking to introduce a new product into the market. Perhaps a company has developed a lower-sodium version of a popular snack food. That innovator would need to come up with at least several hundred thousand dollars, if not $1 million or more, to introduce that new item in all stores of the country’s largest grocery chains.
For many categories of food, the payments do not end there. Supermarkets often charge manufacturers an additional placement fee as an annual rent for a spot in a freezer case or on a shelf. Those fees, or the equivalent in free product, can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments each year.
Food anthropology has long tried to convey that the North American food system is rigged, but the power of the grocery store (as both sociopolitical landscape and as key source of foodstuff access for most Canadians), has not always been considered in this. The only players in the “game” of food system here are the big food manufacturers (Kellogg’s, Nabisco, Nestle, Coca-Cola, etc) that have the big marketing budgets.
So, to see a No Name display so proudly displaying that it was in on the joke of food cost while slotting displays in locations that would cost other food brands thousands of dollars. All for some really crappy powdered No Name chicken noodle soup.
The Hard PC Defense for Price Freezes
In October 2022, Loblaw Company (which oversees the largest food and drug chain in Canada) announced (very loudly) that they were (very generously) freezing prices for their in-house No Name products, as other food costs continued to soar across Canada. Loblaw president and irritatingly chipper spokesperson Galen Weston framed this announcement as a charitable decision, aimed to provide relief throughout some of the worst food inflation seen in the country in the last 40 years.
Yet for Canadian grocery stores, mid-winter prize freezes through the holiday season are standard practice. Some Canadian food executives spoke to the emptiness of the price freeze gesture, since the timing of the freeze was aligned with the standard annual freeze that occurs across the industry:
In an email, Metro spokesperson Marie-Claude Bacon said a holiday blackout “is a long-standing practice” at the company. “Metro does not accept cost price increases from its suppliers at this time of the year, which is the busiest time of the year with the holidays, in order to avoid any retail price changes, with rare exceptions,” she said.
Three sources in the Canadian food manufacturing sector, who spoke on condition of anonymity, backed Metro, saying it’s disingenuous to make a big deal about a price freeze for the next three months, because that is the one period of the year when big grocers typically face little pressure from suppliers to raise prices. Each year, many grocers institute a so-called “blackout” from November until January or February. In that time, grocers refuse to negotiate price increases with suppliers, mostly as a way to make operations simpler during the all-important holiday sales blitz.
Tucked into the messaging of being a cool company that can joke about how much food costs without acknowledging their control and power, is a virtue signal that feels almost as empty as the nutritionally void products they strategically advertise across their stores.
Consumer backlash across social media focused on the tone that Loblaw Companies (parent store for Zehrs and all President’s Choice products) took in handling rising food prices.
Journalist Ghada Alsharif explored how and why the company’s strategy online backfired:
Public relations experts say that the strategy may not have been the supermarket’s best decision.
“There is a very defensive tone from Loblaw as though they are lecturing Canadians on how things work — how food inflation and how the business world functions and how it affects us,” said Rachel Thexton, president at Vancouver-based PR firm, Thexton Public Relations. “That’s not what Canadians want to hear right now. They want to be able to fill their cart with food for their families.”
The tone, rather than the situation, does amplify the feelings of anger, frustration, and lack of control for most people that find an increase in grocery store bills and little flexibility with their incomes and resources to match it. Since the beginning of the pandemic, overt displays of wealth from celebrities and CEOs has felt like salt in a festering wound. The reality of struggle with food, bills, and everyday living becomes in direct contrast to the cheerful wealth of someone like Galen Weston. More infuriating is the philosophy-major-bro approach that Weston has taken, where he positions himself in a place of benevolent informant about why the economy is the way it is right now. While this information may be useful, the medium remains the message, and the medium is wealthy corporation profiting from inflation.
Going after “Greedflation”?
By the fourth quarter of 2022, Loblaws had reported $529 million in profits (beating most analysts expectations for the period). While Statistics Canada numbers found that overall inflation fell to 5.9% this January 2023, food prices increased 10.4% compare to last year (up 10.1% from December 2022). Statistics Canada explored multiple factors or elements that contributed to the rise in food prices, such as supply chain disruptions, labour shortages, changes in consumer purchasing patterns, poor weather in some growing regions, tariffs, higher input costs and higher wages, and the war in Ukraine. However, some government figures have put the focus on grocery suppliers and CEOs.
In response to these record food prices for January 2023, leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Jagmeet Singh, has called on the government to act on food affordability after the (annual) price freezes ended. NDP issued the following statement, introducing the concept of “greedflation”:
“Last October, after pressure from the NDP, Loblaw announced that they would freeze some grocery prices. The price freeze shows that grocery giants manipulate how much we pay. Their profits have skyrocketed. They’ve been using inflation as an excuse to hike prices higher than they need to. That’s greedflation.
This coming Wednesday, March 8th, grocery CEOs across Canada (including Galen Weston have been summoned before parliament to testify about food prices. Given the already drama-filled back and forth between Loblaw and rival companies like Metro, I suspect the focus will be more around brand-identity politics (who manipulated common practices as PR stunts and who did not), and less about the right to affordable and accessible food, but we shall see.