Bread and circuses at grocery store
During the summer of 2012, it occurred to me, in spite of my loyalty to a discount grocer, bread had somehow become the frill in my grocery bill.
Like most consumers, I blamed it on inflation and my response to feeling the pinch was to bust my bread machine out of storage and begin tinkering with a better, cheaper loaf. I awoke at the crack of dawn to cook while the kitchen was cool: the tired, naive baker, stumbling around in the dark, spilling flour on the floor, clueless about the extent to which she’d fallen victim to a pricefixing scheme that, by then, was already a decade old.
In new revelations this week based on its investigation to date, the Competition Bureau alleges indictable offences that implicate seven companies in what it refers to as the “socialization” of a price increase to bread: retailers Loblaw, Walmart, Sobeys, Metro and Giant Tiger and suppliers Canada Bread Company Ltd. and George Weston Ltd.
According to the Financial Post, the consumer watchdog has cited “at least 15 alleged instances of co-ordinated price increases following a specific pattern — a sevencent bread price hike by the suppliers who together account for 68 per cent of the commercial bread in the Canadian market and a corresponding bread price increase of 10 cents from the retailers involved.”
Food analysts have been crunching numbers since this story broke late last year, but a conservative estimate of the increased cost to consumers is $1 a loaf. It may have been as high as $1.50 a loaf by the time managing the margins of my family’s grocery budget became untenable in 2012.
Like many people, I have applied for my $25 gift card from Loblaw and have agreed not to participate in any class-action lawsuits. The company calls it a gesture of goodwill, but it’s mostly a getout-of-jail-free card, part of a deal to avoid criminal prosecution. It’s also a bargainbasement mea culpa if ever there was one. Even one year of overpriced bread — if the $1 a loaf per week per family calculation holds true — is $52 for a single year.
Also like many others I have pledged my gift card to a local food program in the hope that maybe there can be some positive outcome from yet another case of betrayal of consumer trust — one that, curiously, barely whispers across social media.
From what I can gather, we care, but not that much. When I ask people if they’ve applied for their gift card, the response is too often, “Yeah, yeah, I’m going to do that.” It will be interesting to see how many millions of us actually take a whole two minutes out of our day to put the squeeze we know so well back on the grocery industry.
The people I feel most sorry for are the small not-for-profit and community groups that buy food in bulk, but don’t have bulk purchasing power. I saw a teacher at my son’s school not long ago in line at the grocery store buying all the bread for grilled-cheese day — enough to feed well over 100 students. I regularly see the women who work at the daycare my son attended, who take turns doing the weekly shopping, loading up the conveyor belt with a couple dozen loaves at a time.
What is the impact to their bottom line over the decade and a half of this price-fixing scheme? Two dozen loaves at $24 too much a week is more than $1,200 in one year alone.
These are the people, more than any others, who need to register for one of the many class-action lawsuits that have been launched in the wake of this scandal. Gift cards simply do not pass muster for economic hardship on this scale.
And all of the CEOs and senior managers of the grocery chains implicated need to spend some time in their own stores watching their customers — and not as if we’re rats in a maze, allowing them to look for new ways to manipulate our spending of time and money in their stores, but to see who we really are. They need to see the single mom stocking up on bread and diapers or the woman from the Catholic Women’s League who put her back out, but is somehow still shopping because it’s her turn to make the sandwiches for the community lunch.
I have to wonder if the track record of trickery in the grocery trade — large carts (the bigger the better); faraway milk (the farther the better); eye-level positioning of higher-margin, brand-name items (the easier to see and reach the better) — is partly to blame for its apparent contempt for its customers.
After all, they do have spreadsheets that prove our gullibility and susceptibility to marketing ploys. It’s so easy to see us as dumb sheep lining up to get shorn. Why not shave off a little more here and there?
Maybe the journey from the outer reaches of salesmanship to indictable offence isn’t that difficult to make.