what's in a boycott?
on loblaws boycotts, monopolies, and long-term food future accountability
My family spent three nights last week playing a heated game of Monopoly. I was quickly reminded by the last night how frustrating it is to dedicate so much time to a game, only to go completely bankrupt at the hands of one person who controls the whole board. My husband won, my daughter was in tears, and I was fuming. This was the original intent of the game — a playful critique of capitalism and the ability for one individual or company to have a monopoly.
The game felt like a timely reminder amidst the ongoing Loblaws boycott happening across Canada this May. This grocery store boycott serves as a response to growing frustrations about the costs, quality, and availability of food in grocery stores, while the federal government has stalled in their progress of a Grocery Code of Conduct bill for the “big five” retailers in Canada (Loblaws, Metro/Empire, Costco, Sobeys, and Walmart).
I am cautiously hopeful that this boycott provides some much-needed short term fire to the broader problem of food costs in Canada. But I wanted to take a bit of time to explore the nuances of it specifically thinking about what questions its asking, and what questions it is not asking of our social, economic, and political structures.
While Loblaws boycott is a one-month action, I think it’s important to situate this company-specific boycott into the long-term approaches needed for food security and economic competition that are needed as our population continues to grow and our national landscapes are further challenged by climate change, oil and gas, and electric vehicle material mining.
/loblawsisoutofcontrol boycott
Over the last couple of months, Canadians on Reddit have coordinated a targeted boycott of all Loblaws-owned stores. This includes grocery chains like Real Canadian Superstore, Zehrs, Valu-Mart, Provigo Le Marché, Maxi, Dominion, T&T Supermarket, Fortinos, Freshmart, Atlantic Superstore, Your Independent Grocer, and No Frills. It also includes other Loblaws-owned stores, such as mega drugstore chain Shoppers Drugmart/Pharmaprix.
The boycott demands detailed by r/loblawsisoutofcontrol are specific actions toward Loblaws and include:
An immediate 15% price reduction
Loblaw signing the grocery code of conduct
No further retailer-led price increases for 2024
Increased cost transparency, and clearly identifying items subject to “shrinkflation”
A commitment to affordable pricing and price caps on essential goods; and
A commitment to end price-gouging, with prices reflecting economic conditions (“i.e., when inflation and food inflation cools, prices should cool to go with that”)
As the boycott began, there’s been messaging that ranges across a wide spectrum of politics and experiences. There’s the reminder that boycotts are meant to be inconvenient while sending a message, as Joshna Maharaj aptly demonstrated:
Then there’s the other side of the spectrum (which tends to skew, erm, more rigidly conservative) which has found financial experts and food economics scholars calling out the boycott as juvenile and misinformed. And in the middle, there’s a lot of people wondering how to participate, why it’s just Loblaws-focused, and how to navigate the boycott while many other grocery stores “have been charging waaaaaay more the whole time.”
This boycott is heated, which means that the underlying message of public frustrations around food costs has been a prominent national discussion this month. Which is great! And it makes sense that Loblaws has become the main target. To Maharaj’s earlier point, Loblaws CEO Galen Weston has made himself the (smug) face of food in Canada for over two decades through TV and other media. And if you position yourself to be “the friendly guy” talking about affordable noname brand options while personal pay package was $8.4 million in 2022, you’re going to get an irater public backlash than the CEOs that hide in the shadows.
grocery code of conduct hesitations
One of the demands coming from the boycott revolves around Loblaws needing to sign the Grocery Code of Conduct, or the code. The Grocery Code of Conduct bill has been drafted in response to these economic loopholes so often taken advantage of by the big grocery retailers. It aims to set out agreed-upon rules for any negotiations between grocery retailers and suppliers, as well as outlining process for areas like dispute resolution.
The Toronto Star obtained a federal document in April 2024 that highlighted both Loblaws and Walmart were hesitating on their participation in this voluntary code as of last fall (October 2023). One of the main reasons (unsurprisingly) is that Loblaws was concerned that in signing the code it would “raise food prices by more than $1 billion.”
These hesitations have stalled the active engagements between government and industry, to the point where federal agriculture and agri-food ministers are now examining ways to adopt the legislation in a mandatory format.
In the report by the Toronto Star, Walmart also spoke about their price concerns, noting that they are “conscious of adding unnecessary burdens that could increase the cost of food of Canadians” while also stating that they “support initiatives promoting fairness and reciprocity, and benefitting customers.” The two statements in parallel make me wonder how many delusional consultants and PR agents gather on a Microsoft Teams meeting to find the most vaguely positive language to power forward with.
Amidst these stalls in engagement, I’ve been wondering about the bigger issue of how we got here in the first place. At least since the onset of the pandemic, it feels like we keep having knee-jerk reactions to food cost increase, shrinkflation, and price-fixing schemes. Before 2022, I spent absolutely zero time reading further into the economic and political negotiations that go into food industry supply chains — that was boring (for me!). Food was meant to be interesting and a text to understand the sociocultural elements of the world.
Yet in the last few years, the combination of teaching a variety of food anthropology courses for universities and the reality of my grocery bill skyrocketing forced my interest. (And truthfully, reading more about food economics has made me realize that a lot of these major players are spicy, dramatic babies that would be great in a reality show but hard to handle in real life — take Galen Weston, Walmart spokesperson Sarah Kennedy, or anyone working at Canada Bread).
food professors & lack of competition
One of the more opinionated academic thinkers that mainstream media loves to default to is Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, a Canadian professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. While I often find myself disagreeing with some of his points (i.e., his most recent op-ed), I do respect the years of research and knowledge he has on the financial and economic components of Canada’s food industries.
One of the points he’s made recently has struck a chord in me as we watch the boycott shape out. He made a good point around the particulars of how this monopoly came to be, citing lack of competition as one of the key drivers. In the aforementioned op-ed, he notes:
“This boycott targets Loblaw, Canada’s largest grocer, which controls less than a third of the market. Moreover, the boycott overlooks foreign competitors like Costco and Walmart, which are inexplicably exempt from the movement. The arrival of both Walmart and Costco led to the consolidated grocery industry we have today. This selective targeting undermines the boycott’s credibility.”
He also goes on to provide more detail around the financial reports across major grocers all seeing “same-store food sales growth generally below food inflation rates in recent quarters” and their gross margins remaining stable for the last five years. These financial reports detail that most companies’ recent significant revenues are actually not from foo, but rather from the influx of cosmetics, clothing, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and real estate opportunities.
Charlebois then loses me, as he takes a turn to attack the motives of boycotters and the way they engage in “almost cult-like behaviour” so, grain of salt.
What I take from this op-ed is an important foundation for the complexities here: our grocery industry is highly consolidated, and our federal and provincial government failures to prioritize affordability measures in the last few decades. Dr. Charlebois has repeatedly outlined that it’s not profiteering, but price-fixing schemes, that hurt the cost of food.
Take the short-lived Manulife-Loblaws deal that came out earlier this year, where the insurance company initially arranged a “preferred pharmacy network” that made roughly 260 prescription medications exclusively available for coverage if dispensed at Loblaws-owned pharmacies (such as Shoppers Drug Mart). This type of arrangement (thankfully reversed since then) is similar to what we see in Canada’s telecom industry — monopolies that mean less individual choice and higher prices across the board. The risk of that cascading into healthcare and pharmaceuticals would put huge barriers to appropriate and accessible healthcare for many. Similarly, discussions emerging from the boycott point to some important limitations of our current grocery-store systems around access.
Where I find Dr. Charlebois the most limiting is in how he navigates the widening gap between companies behaving and playing fairly and the increasingly frustrated Canadian public. This is what makes a boycott powerful: where you can organize at the face of feeling powerless and gain some control over your consumer choices to send a clear message.
Academics that are deeply involved in the conversations around the Grocery Code of Conduct and other Competition Act legislation may not always see the realities of grocery expenses and how that impacts people on a granular level. And vice-versa — a person navigating expensive olive oils in the grocery aisle will likely not want to think much about what sorts of testimonies academics and CEOs are giving in fancy suits at the House of Commons.
privileges of time, transportation, money, and mobility
In my mind, both elements are needed to advance our long-term goals of tackling food affordability in Canada. I do question what the boycott means when it comes to how we understand the idea of community going forward. There’s a lot of urgent social media posts detailing the boycott — how to participate, and how to engage with it if you can’t boycott Loblaws.
Like many boycotts, this approach is only useful when people can actively avoid the company itself. But when it’s a boycott of such a vast scale, relating to food and cost of living struggles increasing nation-wide, this isn’t always an option.
When I voiced some of my reluctance to adamantly get on board sharing about the boycott, I was met with DMs from people who were wanting to participate but felt limited by some very real barriers. These included that the only nearest non-Loblaws store was Metro (arguably more expensive), that they lived in a rural area with exclusively Loblaws-owned grocery stores available, that they felt shamed if they were caught with the instantly recognizable bright yellow noname tote bag hauling their groceries back, and that they didn’t have a car or the time to zigzag across their small town to get everything they needed across three or four stores.
Then there’s the ongoing issue of exorbitantly higher food prices in northern Canada, where agency in choice is limited even more than in the more densely populated areas of southern Ontario. A Yukon subreddit points out that the boycott isn’t always an option for northerners:
“Nah man, I gotta eat. I understand the point of the boycott but there’s no viable alternative here and food isn’t exactly optional.”
The idea of community, then, feels central to how we think about the boycott’s impact and next steps. This boycott has so far demonstrated that it is most effectively accessed by the more privileged (in terms of time, money, transportation, family size, and mobility). How can we build lasting public pushback against economic greed and anti-competition, and how can we do so in a way that maintains pressure but does not further push those who can’t participate into feeling guilty or shameful at having to continue shopping in more affordable places like No Frills?
There is much needed discussion occurring at the federal level to limit the breadth of control and monopolization that occurs when food retailers and industries collude to fix food prices or buy out competition across cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, clothing, and more industries. There is also movement on social media to push for affordable food as Canadians face some of the highest levels of food insecurity seen to date.
Ultimately, I think we need to keep balancing all the plates to ensure a better food future for Canadians: one where there are national and provincial food policies, rather than an unsustainable over-reliance on food banks, and one where there are mandatory legislations in place to ensure business competition is maintained, and monopolies are avoided.
Thank you for reading! You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, or check out AnthroDish podcast on iTunes and Spotify.
If you’re interested in more grocery-specific essays, I’ve accidentally started creating a collection of them:
Are Groceries Really a Splurge? On persistent millennial food stigmas and anxieties
Price Fixing Chicken Eggs: considerations on food costs, inflation, and security
Where do we go next for affordable and accessible food in Canada? A rage dump of food in Canadian news and politics this fall
No Name Notes From a Grocery Store: the politically charged landscape of Canadian grocery stores
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