The Loblaws Boycott And My Alternative
If you’ve been responsible for paying any bills at all in the past five years, you will agree that absolutely everything has become more expensive. In Canada, the major grocery chains are the biggest culprits of inflation. None of us should be surprised, considering the bread price-fixing scandal that came to light about 8 years ago. During covid, basic essentials doubled in price, making life much more difficult for most Canadians.
Over on Reddit, people have come together under the subreddit /LoblawsIsOutOfControl to organize a Loblaws boycott throughout May. I have a few issues with this boycott.
- Loblaws is not the only problem. The only reason we are focused on them is because Galen Weston is so identifiable and his face is so punchable.
- If you look back to the bread price-fixing scandal, it wasn’t just Loblaws. Walmart Canada, Sobeys, Metro and Giant Tiger were all dragged through the lawsuit. Loblaws were the most guilty, but the other chains took part as well, and for many of us in Canada, they are the ONLY option for groceries.
- The federal government has literally brought in the grocery chains’ CEOs to have a stern talking to and they completely ignored the demands for lower prices. If they can ignore that, they will easily ignore the entire nation.
- Many of us depend on price matching to save money, and No Frills and Superstore are two of the best options. FreshCo isn’t in many smaller cities, and Giant Tiger doesn’t have the selection to price-match many items.
In my opinion, a complete boycott is too difficult for enough people to make this truly effective. Speaking from my own experience, the main people to feel the effects of this will be the people working in the grocery stores because their hours can be cut depending on the foot traffic and orders the week before.
My Loblaws Boycott Alternative
Personally, I cannot afford to shop anywhere but Superstore. The combination of the price-matching with my Colleague Discount Program would make me stupid to shop elsewhere. I am all for sticking it to the companies, so I’ve created an alternative to the Loblaws Boycott.
For the month of May, I will do everything I can to keep my shopping to its base ingredients.
Loblaws have proven they don’t care about the opinions of their customers OR the government, but my experience with other interests has proven that stakeholders are MUCH harder to ignore. So instead of boycotting all groceries, I am boycotting foods that have been processed. Using this week’s flyers as an example, buying a whole chicken ($3.99/lb) is cheaper than buying bone-in chicken breasts ($5.49/lb). The price of boneless skinless chicken breasts jumps to $6.79/lb, almost double the price of a whole chicken.
Another example is looking at the price per 100g through the Walmart Canada app. A 2.5kg bag of flour is $5.97, or 24¢/100g, while a basic loaf of Dempster’s white bread is 53¢/100g. The only other ingredients you need are yeast, water, a little sugar, salt and time.
My plan is to cut out the middleman in my food production. No Wonder Bread or Dempsters for bread, no Christie or LeClerc for cookies, no Campbells or Kraft… I plan to make as much as I can myself. The logic here is that I want the Loblaws company to see that I’m shopping still, but I am NOT indulging in their markups, and I want their stakeholders to be the ones suffering the real losses.
The only thing this will cost me is time, in the end. And honestly, there are ways I can even make that easier, like doing an overnight fridge proof when making bread, or batch cooking and baking.
My Recipe Recommendation
Since I have used bread as an example a few times in this blog, I’m going to share my go-to bread recipe: White Bread Recipe from Brown Eyed Baker. I really like this recipe because it makes a solid two loaves, but the recipe is a bit too big to easily make in a KitchenAid. My technique is to make a shaggy dough, aka mix it just enough that is it’s a singular ball of dough, and then I split it into two and let the dough hook do the hard work.
There is nothing quite like the smell of fresh baked bread, so the bonus of it being affordable and a way of sticking it to Canada Bread directly makes it even better.
I’m going to do my best to try and post a few more of my favourite recipes that I’m using to avoid buying brands. My pizza craving refuses to go away, so I might share a pizza dough recipe, or my pizza monkey bread recipe, which is very addictive. I’m also going to be making my own ice cream when possible so maybe I can share those too.
To see the posts where I share more recipes, check out the Recipes Category on here.
