Deachman: Loblaw boycott may be ‘ineffectual and juvenile,’ but it’s still worth doing

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I still recall the excitement of being involved in consumer boycotts when I was much younger.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the boycott of Nestlé exposed me to a veritable and instructional buffet of social causes worth championing, including baby formula marketing, plastics and water use, child labour practices and deforestation, issues that made it easy to give the Swiss conglomerate a hard pass.

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Even before then, when I was in shorts and not yet a fully formed consumer, my parents’ activism led me to righteously, albeit involuntarily, avoid eating California grapes in the 1960s, or much of anything manufactured by Kraft in the early 1970s (and to this day). Whether the absence of individually wrapped processed cheese slices from my childhood diet made the world even one iota better was never clear to me, but the notion that such a pocketbook protest could have some kind of effect certainly was.

And so this past weekend I joined the month-of-May boycott of Loblaw organized by the subreddit group r/loblawsisoutofcontrol, even though Sylvain Charlebois, Dalhousie University’s “food professor,” described the action as misguided and suggested it “may be an ineffectual and juvenile attempt to challenge a ‘Goliath’ like (board chairman and director, and former CEO and president) Galen Weston.”

That may be so. Chief among the group’s “demands” is that Loblaw lower its prices by 15 per cent, which I imagine the company will have difficulty agreeing to.

Critics also point to what they say are other flaws of the protest: Loblaw, for example, is hardly the only food behemoth making obscene profits as food prices soar. Metro, Sobeys, Walmart and Costco all appear to be doing just fine. Additionally, Loblaw isn’t alone among the Big Food Fraternity members refusing to sign the Grocery Store Code of Conduct. So why just it?

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The boycott, meanwhile, is also impractical for many consumers: rural residents, say, who don’t have nearby options, or those who rely on public transit or have mobility issues.

As the boycott enters its second week, it’s unclear whether it is having the desired effect. The subreddit group chat offers numerous anecdotal suggestions that it is, but Loblaw is hardly on its knees. After the boycott’s first five days, in fact, the price of the company’s stock actually rose, reaching an all-time high of $156.52 on Monday morning, nearly $10 higher than when the consumer snub began. How much more of this kind of bad news can Loblaw endure before it has to issue more million-dollar bonuses to its executives?

But what critics fail to take into account is how a boycott like this makes people feel. It allows them to vent some of their frustrations, and while Loblaw may not be the sole culprit, its record profits don’t sit well with consumers whose grocery bills are growing faster than their pay stubs. How else to explain the more than 5,000 people who have put their names to an online parliamentary petition, 10 times the number required to force a response in the House of Commons?

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Hopefully many of those signatories will also take part in this Sunday’s May 12 “Support Your Local Grocer Day” by getting at least some of their groceries from an independent grocer.

Because sending a message, whether by petition, boycott, letter or email, is important. I can still recall how angry I was when the Loblaw’s store opened in Westboro, absent the design features the company had promised, which would have given the store a more human scale. But I failed then to let the company know.

I remember, too, my ire at Weston when he suggested that farmers’ markets posed a health risk, and when Loblaw’s involvement in a years-long bread price-fixing scheme was revealed. Yet I didn’t even apply for the $25 gift card Loblaw offered by way of apology.

Then there was my disappointment early in the pandemic, when Loblaw announced it was cancelling the $2 wage premium it had been giving its lowest-paid workers who were deemed essential. Again, though, I did nothing.

So joining this boycott, however ineffectual and juvenile it may be, is my way of finally sending Loblaw a message. The company’s goal, according to its website, is “to help Canadians Live Life Well®.” Perhaps a little pressure from customers will increase its appetite to do that.

Born in Fort William, Ont., a city that no longer appears on maps, Bruce Deachman has called Ottawa home for most of his life. As a columnist and reporter with the Citizen, he works at keeping Ottawa on the map. You can reach him at bdeachman@postmedia.com.

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