While walking through a North Vancouver grocery store owned by Jim Pattison, one of Canada’s richest billionaires, I was astounded by price changes imposed in the last few years. To get to that store, I drove two kilometres beyond a supermarket owned by the billionaire Weston family. Four kilometres in the opposite direction was a supermarket owned by the billionaire Sobey family.
Of course, I could have purchased items at London Drugs or Amazon, both controlled by billionaires. Or I might have had groceries delivered from Costco by a company owned by another billionaire.
Canada’s wealthiest grocers are not just retailers. Their corporate groups are involved in food production and distribution. They own numerous wholesalers and control competition from many independents. Other billionaire families — Saputo, McCain, Von Mandl, Bouchard, Latifi, Louie, D’Amours, Irving, Servitje Montull, Cargill-MacMillan, Lemann, etc. — are important players in Canada’s food and beverage industries.
Long-time Richmond council member Harold Steves offered a partial explanation of how we got to where we are:
Buying out the opposition & shutting them down is the norm for monopoly capitalism. Steveston had many canneries. Big fish ate the little fish until there was only one cannery left. Weston bought it, shut it down & sold the land from all the canneries for houses & apartments.
Forbes Magazine reported that food and beverage sales have produced more than 200 billionaires. Control of economic sectors vital to ordinary citizens enables the privileged to accumulate boundless wealth.
According to Douglas Rushkoff:
The behaviour of today’s mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial...
Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension.
Unbearable Hubris
A decade ago, Warren Buffett, then the second richest man in the USA, said he was paying a lower rate of income tax than his secretary. Should that be possible in a just society?
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Categories: Economics
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Actually the capitalism model is a hard sell. It only works if you have consumers and we are living in the late stages of capitalism now. Everything is for sale. Capitalism is synonymous with growth (greed) and we have finite resources to support the model as we all know. Society is cashing in everywhere. The onset of big happened 25 years ago all through the mid west USA when Walmart moved into the smaller towns and the mom and pop stores boarded up. They could not compete. Walmart became the only game in town.
Yes prices through the roof. I built myself a little DB app on a small tablet that I carry when shopping. It has brand, item desc, store, location, date, price, um and cost per um and if it is a sale item. About 5 years worth of data. I use it when shopping.and add anything new when I get home. It helps the impulse buy. Not for everyone but is a great trip down memory lane so to speak.
Keep in mind that we have outsourced the production of a lot of what we buy and stand on those wage earner shoulders and they are striving to try and obtain a living wage which in some cases if successful we now pay and so we should. That is until the corporations move production to a cheaper labour force country and unfortunately the price of the product does not drop.
But yes the big box grocery stories still have healthy gross margins in the products we buy and is disclosed in their annual published financial statements. If you regulate capitalism it becomes another ism. It might have social in there somewhere.
Does anyone remember the corner store?
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Maybe we need to encourage more co-ops.
https://energeticcity.ca/2024/02/05/watts-happening-the-quiet-revolution-of-cooperatives/
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Yes I agree Pat. I can remember when MEC was a co-op (Calgary). Great products at an affordable price and operated under a membership model. You almost have to call your banker if you want to shop there now. I can’t afford to anymore.
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Whats next – airlines that send your lost luggage to charity or leave you at curb after cancelling a flight while not following rules of compensation that Ottawa seems not to enforce.? lotus eaters in lotus land?
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