A new study by Léger has assessed Canadians’ perceptions on the Loblaws boycott, which is currently underway over claims of greedflation.
I also have serious moral reservations about shopping at Walmart. We’re trying to use Costco when we can, but for small things, we don’t have a reasonable alternative. For the moment, we’re using Walmart when we must just to help discourage Loblaws’ bullshit, but I’d really like literally any other option.
Where do you live? In BC we have Safeway, save on, some minor stores attached to them, and the occasional whole foods. Some Asian grocery stores too like sungiven
Oh, wtf - I thought Saveon was a Loblaws subsidiary… well, to Saveon I go then.
Few more places to consider if you’re in lower mainland:
Freshco/Chalo if you have the option over Safeway/IGA (same stuff, cheaper, though produce isn’t always super fresh).
Langley farm market for produce is great, often good deals and competes with big chains on prices on said produce, meat, not so much other stuff (again limited access depending on where exactly you live unfortunately).
I’d do Saveon only armed with price matching flyers or I’m after something very specific I can’t find elsewhere. Plus I’m not a huge fan of Jim Patisson or whichever carguy owns it.
City avenue market is also pretty good for produce and the occasional offers for other stuff.
Very location specific - if you like a good bread, check out European bakery in Poco, awesome rye that would cost you 3times as much in some “artisan” bakery and still cheaper than semi decent loaf from big chains.
Edit-stupid autocorrect
Costco > Walmart
- Walmart as a better alternative to buy anything is just fucking sad
- Any business that was around during Walmarts rise learned from it and perfected competition-crushing aspects that it missed
- People have been screaming that this business model will destroy quality of life for everyone given a long enough timeline, and it is now here
Lots of people saw this coming and the vast majority of people didn’t want to acknowledge it. I don’t know what else to say.
The vast majority of people couldn’t do anything about it. Those who could do something about it profited from it, and therefore did nothing.
Nobody had to shop at the place offering “the cheapest shit” while all the smaller businesses were forced out of the market. People literally had a choice to spend one extra dollar, or end up here.
If you fall for the rhetoric that money is everything then yeah alright… Nobody could do anything about it I guess.
Did they though? When wages have stagnated for decades? It’s really easy as a middle or upper class person to say “what’s a dollar here and there?”, but as a poor person it’s the difference between running out of money before payday or not. The long term cost of shopping at Walmart is greater than the short term savings, but poor people generally do not have the luxury of thinking about the long term.
Walmart sells Classico pasta sauce for $2.97 in my area or 4/$10. Or I could go to zerhs and buy 1 for $7.99…
Ridiculous markup.
Oh look, two more publicly traded companies that are beholden to shareholders and single mindedly focused on profit.
Just because they’re cheaper doesnt mean they aren’t just as greedy as Loblaws
I fundamentally agree with you that publicly-traded corporations are inherently problematic due to the nature of their fiduciary duty to shareholders. That said, I think Costco is clearly the lesser of these particular evils. I have no doubt that given time they’ll turn to shit, but thus far (to my understanding) they at least pay something resembling a living wage and have reasonably consumer-friendly policies.
Shopping local could (if even possible) be the more ethical option, but most people are struggling and small grocers simply don’t have the margins to generally be affordable. I’m betting very few of them are able to pay their employees anything close to Costco either (if they even care to - plenty of small business owners are greedy in their own right).
Now if only I didn’t have a panic attack every time I set foot in a Costco …
That said, I think Costco is clearly the lesser of these particular evils. I have no doubt that given time they’ll turn to shit, but thus far (to my understanding) they at least pay something resembling a living wage and have reasonably consumer-friendly policies.
You’re absolutely right. Give credit where credit is due.
But eventually when the line stops going up then all of those worker/customer friendly policies will go out the window.
As far as I can tell, Costco isn’t the lesser of two evils, but rather the one non evil choice of the pair. Their profit margin is something like 2%, which is just what they get from membership fees. But this is what I recall from memory, and it’s data from many years ago, so if anyone has evidence to the contrary, do share.
