Columnists
Put it on the table
“So, Theresa, tell us how it is you managed to have a profit this year.” “Well, that’s a really interesting question. Let me see. Oh! Oh! I got it. Like diets, the more you bring in and the less you put out equals a gain.” Who knew I could be so profitable? I can turn a bag of chips into a hefty gain. Anyway, I wonder if I should share this wisdom, this simple math, with the likes of Galen Weston, Michael Medline and Eric La Flèche. I was listening to the Parliamentary proceedings with regard to the price of putting food on the table in Canada and I was surprised to hear none of the people knew anything about what making a profit means. Wealthy people like Galen, Michael and Eric sometimes get tripped up with the definition of profit. And part of the problem is each of them are millions and millions of dollars away from putting the peanut butter back on the shelf because they can’t afford it. They are millions and millions of dollars away from food insecurity. They are so far removed from what a lot of people deal with every single day, they may never be able to understand the working poor.
First of all, let’s talk about perspective. If people are living paycheque-to-paycheque, it will never be easy to handle the dramatic increases in the price of food basics and personal hygiene necessities that have occurred in the last thirty-six months. For the Grocery Tsars, the problem is in the simplicity of the problem. It’s so simple, they just don’t see it. There cannot be a gain (a getting ahead) for people who aren’t Galen, Eric and Michael because they spend more than they bring in. Each time the cost of a loaf of bread or bag of apples or box of cereal inches upward—while their income from a paycheque, or social support, either stays the same or doesn’t keep pace with inflation—then the less they have. They have less buying power, less food on the table and less left over at the end of the week. Galen, Michael and Eric didn’t invent food insecurity, but each one of them have the means, and the wherewithal, to do something about it. Yet, they told that Parliamentary Committee the cost of groceries has nothing to do with their profit-making. Huh? How is it that three highly educated men could seem so naïve as regards the most basic of bookkeeping? Why would they assume we, the consumers, are so ignorant we couldn’t possibly understand what is happening. Their perspective, coming from a different plane, is skewed. I will bet hard-earned dollars to No- Name™ donuts that Galen, Michael and Eric aren’t waiting for blue light specials or poring over grocery flyers for deals or clipping coupons or dealing with nausea as the final total appears on the clerk’s screen on food shopping day. Raise you hand if you’ve ever had to put something back because you just didn’t have enough money to cover the total. Go on. Think about it. There are people, right here in our community, who do just that every, single time they grocery shop.
Come on Messrs MBA! Wake up and smell the really cheap coffee. “Loblaws, alone, took in a profit of about $1 million per day above what it saw before the pandemic.” That is concerning to me, and no doubt to all y’all. Remember back in the early days of The Pandemic when a small package of TP/Bumpf was hitting the shelves at an easy twenty bucks for a six pack? The reason, according to the Three Grocery Amigos, was all about supply and demand and the supply chain. When millions of people were out-of-work, many without any source of steady income, somehow it was okay to make obscene profits on the backs of folks who could barely afford prepandemic prices? The logic was a bit fuzzy to everyone. And it’s not easy getting by without TP. While Canada’s inflation rate topped out at about eight per cent last summer, food prices soared and went up to more than ten percent by the end of October. And food prices are expected to continue to increase, although more slowly, in 2023.
Perhaps Galen, Michael and Eric should spend a month in the shoes of the average consumer. Galen argues the whole world is in a “cost of living crisis”. Funny how he can smell the poop but doesn’t realize it’s on his doorstep.
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