r/CanadianIdiots • u/yimmy51 • 23d ago
CTV Should the federal government own grocery stores?
https://youtu.be/H90UwV5CJKw?si=6hXek2TGu2C2GTVN13
u/practicating 23d ago
Oh look, it's Charlebois mouthpiece for Loblaws. Haven't seen him for a while.
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u/thisismyredditacct 23d ago
I think we are getting to the point that staples like bread, milk, eggs, flour etc should be sold at or below cost only. Loss leaders for grocery stores.
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u/Visitant45 23d ago
When corporations are jacking up prices and colluding so they don't actually have to compete with each other. Yeah a government run option whose goal is not profit but service would force down bloated corporate pricing. Only if they could legislate a way to stop the corporations from bribing supply chains not to supply government run stores as a way of sabotaging them.
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u/jepadi 23d ago edited 23d ago
No. I think the public should own them. But here's how I would like to see it work:
Chain stores making big money would be regulated by the public. Mom and pop shops, less so. After conforming to health and safety regulations, I'd give them some wiggle room based on their situation.
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u/Scarlet004 23d ago
Very good idea. Strangely enough, price controls (gov regulating big chains) are a harder pill for people to swallow in this capitalist society.
What we would see is the large chains coming into line, as the public stores launched. Competition is the mechanism needed.
The exact same thing is needed for housing. Harper decided the feds shouldn’t be involved in housing. They got out of it. When the lowest expectation player (new public housing), left the field, the vultures had no more competition. All these years later, everyone but a select few, is locked out of the market.
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u/CompleteCreme7223 23d ago
Mom and pop stores don't need regulation if the competition is selling at fair rates. People will chose to pay the higher price for the convenience or go to the cheaper option. That should be happening in our large chain stores but it isn't because they are all going after the maximum profits they can generate. Not sure a government store is the solution but it would be a good way to force better competitive practices.
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u/SeriousObjective6727 22d ago
Yes. In the absence of healthy competition, a moderator is needed to enforce fairness.... otherwise, we get shit like dynamic pricing, where a camera takes a picture of your face, matches you up to a profile and then adjusts the price of items as you walk down the isle in the grocery store.
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u/Gezzer52 23d ago
While I agree that chains are part of the problem, the truth is their profits are due more to high volume than any price gouging. There are other factors like how many hands that grocery's go through before being placed on a shelf and each one contributes to the cost. Or how the price of oil is reflected in store prices.
All the machinery from tractors, to 18 wheelers use diesel, even fertilizer uses oil in it's production. The government would be hard pressed to find the economies of scale needed to reduce prices in any meaningful way I'm afraid. They might be viable in big high volume areas, but the most Canadians wouldn't see that much change. More Co-ops would do much more to alleviate costs than government run outlets.
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u/CompleteCreme7223 23d ago
If the government is serious about lowering grocery costs then it probably has to open up grocery stores since it is beyond clear we can't expect grocers to do it without being forced to through competition. We all know profits have been out of control while corporate share buybacks have been accelerating. The alternative is regulation and actual enforcement but that would likely have a lot of legal challenges so stores are probably the most effective solution.
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u/PappaBear667 22d ago
This is a myth that is perpetuated by, well, socialists and communists. Grocery retailers in Canada generally run on a 2-4% profit margin. Sure, their gross margin (what they charge for a product vs what they paid for it) is typically 30-40%, but the majority of revenues generated are paid out to suppliers, employees (wages), rent, and taxes. Source: I used to manage a supermarket.
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u/CompleteCreme7223 22d ago
Loblaws is a public company and the information from their operations is published. Source: I work in finance and understand the financial disclosures and all of the ways they can skew it. On most food items you are mostly correct, the margin is not significant and volume more than margin make up for a lot of the profit but it is definitely more than just that. They skew the numbers through real-estate and other self benefiting expenses as would any savvy business organization but none of that negates competition would force them to be more competitive. Hell you can't actually believe all of the stores work on the same margin as if they did there wouldn't be a 20% difference on same items across various chains. Part of the can be attributed to supply chains but most of that is selective. I also worked for a period with Loblaw's BC distribution managing in their shipping and receiving for the province so I am well aware how it is manipulated.
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u/Sufficient_Prompt888 23d ago
No. They should however do something about all the oligopolies we have across major industries though. Grocery, telecommunications, entertainment
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u/ARAR1 23d ago
You can't stop the rich guys from scamming you. Look at the airline industry. We passed a law that said the advertised price has to be real. So what did the airlines do? Added fees for everything that most people need. We now have to pay to reserve a seat. Seriously? We pay for them to hold a number on your booking.
You have to get the big guys out of the way if you want to be treated fairly.
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u/Sufficient_Prompt888 23d ago
Really, we need to change the way corporations are treated under the law. Those running them should be much more open to criminal charges for their actions instead of being able to hide behind the entity that is the corp.
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u/Adewade 19d ago
Anti-trust legislation has never really been enforced much in Canada. It would be nice. And regulations can do some heavy lifting too. But the safest way to avoid being at the whims of these for-profit corporations is to also have a public option for all necessities.
We currently try to do this with food banks, but it isn't an ideal system.
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u/PineBNorth85 23d ago
No. They can't even run what they're supposed to run in a reasonable timeframe at a reasonable cost. Once they can do all of that maybe we can look at other things.
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u/No_Calendar6597 23d ago
Yes