The knives are out over Loblaw handling of bread price-fixing
Loblaw Companies Ltd.’s attempt to mitigate potential damage from an investigation into an alleged industry-wide bread price-fixing scheme through its admission of guilt and gift card offering has been met with backlash from skeptical consumers and indignant competitors alike.
Loblaw and its parent company George Weston Ltd. revealed Tuesday they alerted the Competition Bureau after discovering a 14-year-long bread price-fixing arrangement. As a gesture of good will, Loblaw is offering customers a $25 gift card that can be used at its grocery stores across Canada.
“This conduct should never have happened,” CEO Galen G. Weston said Tuesday.
“The gift card is a direct acknowledgment of that to our customers. We hope that they’ll see it as a meaningful amount that demonstrates our commitment to keeping their trust and confidence.”
However, some early visitors to the sign-up page have expressed concern that the barebones site looks like a phishing attempt by savvy scammers.
The site, which went live Tuesday, did not initially include text about user privacy and the company’s use of the email addresses it collects. It has since been updated to “to make the limited use of the email addresses more explicit to users,” spokesman Kevin Groh told the Canadian Press on Thursday.
The addition came after several visitors expressed concern on social media over details — or lack thereof — available on the site.
The site displays a logo that simply says “Loblaw” rather than the company’s full name typically pictured in its logo. It has a banner photo of a piece of bread and several sentences of text with instructions on when registration will open. The page lacks any links or a copyright symbol that’s found on many other sites affiliated with the company.
“It just looks like a Wordpress site that in theory anyone could have done,” Cameron Kennedy of Toronto told the Canadian Press.
It’s likely Loblaw was in a rush to make the site available to the public, said Hasan Cavusoglu, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business in Vancouver.
The corporate handout seems to have done little to stave off class-action lawsuits, one of which was launched two days after the company’s apology.
An anti-poverty activist from Ontario is the lead plaintiff in a class-action filed Thursday seeking $1 billion in damages from Loblaw, George Weston and the other five companies under investigation. The suit has not been certified and none of the claims have been proven in court.
Loblaw’s apology and admission Tuesday has also been met with derision from its major grocery rivals Sobeys and Metro, which accuse it of implicating them in its admitted illegal activities by referring to the arrangement as “industry-wide.”
Sobeys and Metro, in addition to Canada Bread, Walmart and Giant Tiger, were also named in affidavits filed by the Competition Bureau in seeking search warrants to gather evidence for the investigation.
But both Metro and Sobeys have denied any wrongdoing.
Loblaw and George Weston’s statement “was unfair, unsubstantiated, and quite possibly defamatory,” wrote Sobeys CEO Michael Medline in a letter to Weston dated Thursday.
Metro shares Medline’s outrage, spokeswoman Marie-Claude Bacon said.
“Metro is not pleased with Loblaw making Metro appear guilty by association. It is unacceptable,” she said.