Food prices, including a $40 chicken, has stoked fury and calls for big foreign supermarket chains to come to Canada.

Late last year, Emily Johnson took to Reddit to share her frustration with how expensive food in Canada has become.

She fixated on one grocer in particular: Loblaw, the dominant food retailer in Canada, boasting nearly 2,500 stores.

Her Reddit group - named LoblawsIsOutofControl - was filled with photos of grocery items for sale at seemingly egregious prices, like C$40 ($29.36; £23.06) for 1.4 kilograms of chicken.

Soon after, Ms Johnson and others banded together to launch a nation-wide boycott against Loblaw, saying they were fed up with the disparity between rising food prices and record profits.

  • Papamousse@beehaw.org
    9·
    6 months ago

    Loblaws branded stores disappeared from QC years ago. In Québec, Métro is pretty expensive, like IGA or Provigo. The cheapest groceries are Maxi (yeah, it’s Loblaws group) and SuperC (Metro group). But for me, all fruits/vegetable comes from local greengrocers, who also sell various ham/cold cuts and lot of cheese, sometimes for 50% of the price of groceries, and it’s fresh cut. Else for some bulks there’s bulk barn, and Costco, or sometimes even Amazon, a family box size cereal is $10.99 at IGA and the same one is $5.49 on Amazon.

    • Cyborganism
      16·
      6 months ago

      Loblaws, the name, isn’t used in Quebec anymore, no. But their brand stores are very much here.

      The whole point is not to just boycott stores that say “Loblaws” on the sign. But to boycott all the chains they own like Shoppers Drug Mart/Pharmaprix, Provigo, Maxi, T&T, as well as No Name, Life and PC brands, etc.

      Anything Galen Weston Jr owns.