Excluding gasoline, headline inflation would have been 4.0% in June, following a 4.4% increase in May.
Canadians continued to see elevated grocery prices (+9.1%) and mortgage interest costs (+30.1%) in June, with those indexes contributing the most to the headline CPI increase.
The all-items excluding food index rose 1.7% and the all-items excluding mortgage interest cost index rose 2.0%.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230718/dq230718a-eng.htm?HPA=1
Boy that grocery inflation sure is sticky. Almost like the cause is located within the industry itself and not a factor being forced upon it externally.
It’s almost like food is something everyone needs and has to buy no matter the cost, so there’s no incentive for grocery stores to reduce their profit margins.
Competition/survival is the only incentive to reduce profit margins. Co-ops have no profit incentive.
This, seemingly inevitable, position was a long term strategy from consolidated major players with a history of collision.
Immediate steps you can take to help:
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If there is a co-op grocery option near you, join it. Second best is a local grocer. (Unpacking the supply chains is another beast…)
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Join a CSA / buy direct from farms. Avoid imported foods to the extent possible.
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Write you MP and MPP to support the removal of taxes on seeds and seedlings for food products, a tax that benifts major players and hurts non-profit growers.
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Grow some food, share it with your friends/family. Either on your own property or, for us condoites, community gardens.
Join a CSA / buy direct from farms.
Sounds good but I can get all my groceries from Walmart and have next day delivery for like $7. I would love to ditch Walmart, but not having a car makes me value the logistics a lot.
Look up “farm boxes” or “farm co-ops” in your area.
My brother lives in the city but get a big box of local produce delivered weekly. It’s really cheap too for how much he gets. I’m pretty sure the program is just called “local farm box” or something like that.
The massive chains are always the cheapest in town. Until they’re the only ones in town, then the prices rise. This is the strategy, they kill local businesses then set the prices.
I appreciate the choice many be difficult for you as an individual, but appreciate you are making the wrong choice. I need, and sometimes just want, to make bad choices too.
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The problem with groceries is that the raw product is largely bought on futures contracts, so you’re paying last year’s price. Last year was inflated due to fertilizer issues and general concern around the Ukraine conflict. The raw product price is now down ~50% since last year, but it will take until next year to see that show up in the store.
but it will take until next year to see that show up in the store.
I really wish I wasn’t so jaded. I can’t bring myself to believe that. Hope I’m wrong.
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but no, no greedflation here
There needs to be services that directly connect farmers with consumers. The grocery store serves as a middleman that’s honestly become rather useless given that many people use another middleman (Instacart, etc.) to actually get their groceries.
I’m open to building one and have a decent way of organizing logistics, but I have no idea how to reach out to farmers (who to reach out to, for what crops, and who is getting the most exploited by grocery stores).
That doesn’t scale, and it’s sometimes even illegal. We /used/ to deal with market failure and make sure basic services were met by creating crown corporations. Imagine that the Westons had to compete with a public company that got basic food goods from the farms to stores at industrial scale and at break-even costs. Heck, it could even lose money in remote areas where people can’t currently access healthy food as the healthcare savings would be a great investment. It wouldn’t have to be fancy, and it wouldn’t have to include anything highly processed -just basic, healthy grocery goods that meet our needs. The capitalists would do fine, but would have to either actually be more efficient than the publicly owned system, or rely on premium goods for their profits (which they already mostly do anyway).
The Lufa model needs to spread across the country. They have a handful of urban greenhouses in Montreal, so a lot of the produce I buy is actually grown in the city, and everything else that they can’t grow themselves is procured directly from the producers/farms, not from a re-seller.
(although, fuck their labour practices, I very much wish they had competition in the city so they would be pressured to clean up their act in that regard, I hate that I feel like I have to compromise my values in some way in order to buy local and direct)
Lufa is good quality and fresh (usually), but it certainly isn’t cheap!
For some industries you can’t do this because of regulatory capture.
For example dairy. Dairy farmers are not allowed to sell to anyone except the cooperative, who does all the processing and then sells to stores. Since the dairy cartel is in bed with the grocery cartel, good luck breaking in.
Also fo meat, any meat sold in Canada must be inspected at a federal abbatoire. Guess who owns the abbatoires? The big guys, and they’re not going to sell to you because the beef cartel is in bed with the grocery cartel.
That can’t be universally true - you can buy meat from independent farms. Maybe you’re correct about logistics at scale, but at the individual farm level, you can definitely purchase meat.
at the individual farm level, you can definitely purchase meat.
Yes, unless it is poultry, in which case it controlled much like dairy (with an exemption for hobby-scale farms). Although the abbatoire problem remains, and good luck finding an abbatoire these days.
I buy turkey directly from an organic farm like 10 minutes away from my house…
No doubt, but are they breaking the law, or is the flock small enough to be within the exemption?