OPINION Supermarket company giving with one hand and taking with the other
Helping Kaitaia’s Te Hiku Pātaka is all well and good — but high grocery profits are a key contributor to the social need, Wendyl Nissen writes
One of the things I love about opening up my Northern Advocate is reading about the good things that are happening in our region.
I’m always up for a donation to a givealittle campaign to help someone in need and last week I rejoiced at seeing the opening of New Zealand’s first Hiku Pātaka or “social supermarket” in Kaitaia.
Seeing people given the chance to use points to purchase kai in a region where many really struggle to make ends meet made me feel joyful.
Until I read that Foodstuffs were involved. While I am all for Foodstuffs helping struggling families to afford food, I could not help but think that if Foodstuffs didn’t charge so much for food in the first place, we wouldn’t need a pātaka like this.
A while ago I wrote about my intention to boycott supermarkets because the duopoly in this country had driven prices up to a point where people were shopping online in Australia and getting their food sent over because it was cheaper than shopping locally. And we all knew that feeding a family every week was just too expensive, simply because profit was being prioritised over wellbeing.
I’ve been in this place when I was a young mother and I know that the stress of trying to feed a family is not just about getting food on the table, it’s also makes you feel terrible.
After the boycott supermarkets piece was published I received a request to correct my article by Foodstuffs. They claimed that I had got a fact wrong about how much extra a family of four were paying for their groceries every week.
The figure had been calculated by Consumer NZ and I am a board member.
I’ve been a journalist for 40 years and this was not the first time someone had been upset by something I had written. And it was not the first time someone had got it wrong.
Because I hadn’t written about this fact. It was nowhere to be seen in my article, which meant that Foodstuffs in accusing me of getting my facts wrong, had not got their facts right or even read what I wrote.
Did I feel bullied? Certainly. Did I feel as though a highly profitable business was being defensive? Of course. Did I feel like Foodstuffs should shut up and work out how to help people feed their families instead of hounding journalists? Most definitely.
So while I applaud Foodstuffs for helping the pātaka in Kaitaia, I also need to point out that “poorwashing” doesn’t cut it with me.
Instead, they could voluntarily reduce profits and feed children instead of being told to do it by our Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs David Clark, who recently made a commitment to fixing the underlying issues that are producing lacklustre competition, high profits and contributing to high product prices. Meanwhile, I’ve managed not to set foot in a supermarket for two months now. I did receive a $20 off code from Countdown but in the mood I am in I presumed they were setting me up to fail.