Essen zu teuer? Es ist Zeit für öffentliche Lebensmittelgeschäfte
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/its-time-for-public-grocery-stores
Essen zu teuer? Es ist Zeit für öffentliche Lebensmittelgeschäfte
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/its-time-for-public-grocery-stores
14 Kommentare
Agreed. Why not have a public grocery stores? I think that should always be an option. Especially in poor neighborhoods.
The only ones against this would be greedy corporations.
Idea sounds great, until you factor in that most government agencies, by nature, run very very inefficiently. The argument in this article is that most of the cost of a product is profits for the grocery chain. That’s just not true. It’s mostly the wholesale cost of the product and the overhead with running the operation.
Why would manufactures sell their product for cheaper to a city run store that deals in servicing one city compared to a large provincial or national chain that buys in much much higher volumes?
And why would we think that government employees with most salaries and tiny or no performance bonus’s could run a business more efficiently than private sector. Especially if they are union based employees. At least efficient enough to give the large chains a run for their money?
If the proposal is a government subsidized store, then that may work provided it is of available to people that actually need it. And yeah…that process will also become an inefficient bureaucracy with scammers taking advantage.
Want to lower your grocery bill? Do what your grandparents did. Cook healthy meals from scratch, shops for sales, and cut back on convenience and junk foods.
Why the left keeps losing elections: half-baked ideas that don’t connect with real people and won’t fix the underlying problems.
Food isn’t more expensive because of some grand corporate conspiracy to collude on an scale never before seen in Canadian history. Prices are up because supply chains are under immense strain from climate change, trade uncertainty, and foreign conflicts. On top of that, Canada’s own rigged supply-management system drives up costs for everyday staples.
And what will public grocery stores fix? Nothing. They’re just a costly band-aid that ignores the real problems.
Why should we spend tax payer fund to open up a low margin business that’s just a very inefficient way to provide subsidies?
I’m fully behind a crown corporation food distribution system. Make it happen.
Also, I’d really like to get Canada Post back in the game of owning their own stores instead of kiosks paying rent at the back of a loblaws shoppers drug mart.
This is nothing more than the usual pie in the sky nonsense.
>About a year ago, the neighbourhood council asked residents what they wanted to replace Provisions Inc. The discussion coalesced around one idea: a grocery store run publicly and/or not for profit. The city would need to be involved, we reasoned, either through purchasing the building or perhaps even running it.
So the neighbourhood council wants the city to be involved by at the very least buying the building. So a subsidy from every other neighbourhood in the city, and money they’ll never get back since the grocery store will be a non profit.
>A public retailer with a public mandate to provide cheap groceries in food deserts would be huge
Okay, so the retailer has a mandate to provide cheap groceries while also being a non profit.
>There would be other benefits too, like using the system to shore up Canadian supply chains through privileging Canadian farms and food manufacturers, or paying decent wages, thereby raising average wages within the grocery sector.
Oh? So this grocery store is going to be cheap, but also privilege Canadian farms and food manufacturers? And it’s going to pay better than other stores in the grocery sector? And yet still be cheap?
Utter nonsense, and that’s before talking about the necessary economies of scale in purchasing and distribution.
Honestly if housing was balanced food wouldn’t be an issue. Food prices going up as much as they have is something you can work around with different meal planning.
Absolutely not. Dissolve the existing monopoly on groceries. Provide grants for small time stores to upgrade to provide gorceries.
Government control is not the answer. Letting the control the food will be disatrous.
Love the idea, but you would have to be a special level of stupid to think our government could run them effectively.
It’ll either run at a massive loss and require tons of tax revenue, or it’ll have shit quality. Our government can’t even do the things it’s supposed to be good at. This is a pipe dream.
If you run a grocery store at 0% profit margins food prices will only be 2%-4% cheaper (based on public Canadian grocers profit margins). In fact it would probably be way less than this because the government won’t have economies of scale that big grocers do.
Food is expensive because of supply and demand – not because the model of privately owned grocery stores are broken.
There are better ways to provide welfare support for people than poorly thought out ideas like this one
Goodness… we’ve gotten so numb to the benefits of free markets that we forgot why we have them in the first place.
I can absolutely guarantee you that a socialised grocery store would not compete and not have lower food prices without subsidies. And subsidies would just shift the cost elsewhere.
I’m for crown corps in specific cases but this is not it.
This is not a serious solution.
Grocery retailers can be making “record profits” while also having razor thin margins. If you were to remove the profit motive from stores, the end consumer would save maybe 1-3% on every grocery haul.
This assumes government run stores would be just as efficient as the grocery chains which we obviously know won’t be the case.
Instead of public grocery stores we should open our markets to foreign grocers and make what Loblaws does with real estate and supply chains illegal.
The government can do anything competently or in a cost effective way.
The problem with a publicly owned and operated grocery store is that it’s not sustainable in the long run.
The prices will be artificially low, and thus, will be sold at a loss where tax payers fill in the gap. On the argument that it will primarily serve food deserts, there’s no stopping people outside of the neighbourhood going here to buy groceries for cheaper, even if they can afford to buy the same product at Loblaws. There’s also no stopping people from abusing the cheap prices to buy all the stock, even if you put in limitations like 2 max, they can come back.
What will happen are shortages, and it will force shoppers to go buy the same item at a place like Loblaws anyways, at a markup adjusted to reflect the shortages. Not only that, but operational costs add up too.
Taxpayers can only fund the gaps for so long before the gap gets bigger and bigger, and then future governments might need to make cuts or privatize aspects of the service, if not get rid of it completely. It will also feel the same market forces during global shortages of certain items, and they will feel even bigger losses if they continue to sell the items at a loss, or just not carry them at all.