Fed up with high prices, people want to boycott Loblaws. But will it accomplish anything?
CBC
It may very well have started with a tweet about $37 chicken breasts. Or it could have been the $10 birch sticks.
The $9 butter didn't help, or $30 for Feta cheese — allegedly twice the price for the same brand carried by a competitor.
Whatever may have been the social media tipping point, a lot of people are angry about high prices in grocery stores, Loblaw brands in particular. Throw in shrinkflation, skimpflation and greedflation, and now a growing group of people online are calling for a boycott.
"I think a lot of people have very little faith in our political leaders to actually hold corporations accountable for the positions they are putting Canadians in," said Emily Johnson, a mental health and addictions worker in Milton, Ont., who runs a quickly growing Reddit community called "Loblaws is out of control."
"People feel voting with their dollar is the best way of showing companies that they've had enough," Johnson told CBC News.
In a post last month, she and the other subreddit moderators encouraged its now-45,000 members to start boycotting Loblaw and Loblaw-owned stores, such as Superstore and No Frills, in May. The movement that has gained traction on other social media platforms like X, formerly Twitter, and TikTok.
"Canadians are facing a cost-of-living crisis, and grocers are a major contributor to this. Vulnerable populations such as seniors, persons with disabilities, and those on fixed incomes are left further behind," the post reads.
The goal is for the company to reduce prices by 15 per cent and remove member-only pricing, Johnson said. But some grocery and economics experts say a boycott of a brand as massive as Loblaw is unlikely to have much, if any, impact.
Loblaw is sensitive to bad press like any corporation, said Nicholas Li, an assistant professor in the department of economics at Toronto Metropolitan University. But he's skeptical about the planned boycott, he added.
"Loblaws showed earlier in its fight with Pepsico/Frito-Lay that it is willing to leave shelves empty in a fight over money with suppliers, so I find it highly unlikely that a boycott like this ... would make them change their mind," he said.
The planned boycott points to how frustrated many consumers are about food prices, which have gone up everywhere, not just at Loblaw-owned stores, said Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
In a subsequent post, the Reddit group acknowledges the problem extends to "The Big Five" — Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Walmart and Costco — and posts a list of alternative shopping options for them, too.
Loblaw is heavily targeted for two reasons, Charlebois said. First, because it's the top grocer in the country. Second, because its chairman and former president, Galen Weston, was a very visible face of the company — and now people see him a villain.
"I suspect that most Canadians don't know who the CEO of Metro is," Charlebois said. "He's paying for that PR strategy."
