99% Invisible - 411- Podcast Episode

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

After the 1970s oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class families didn’t have money for name brands like Coke or Kellogg’s. Consumers wanted cheaper food. In response, supermarkets had to figure out how to make their store brands more appealing. One chain in France, called Carrefour, was developing a discount store brand when they had an idea. Instead of using bright colors, or putting their own name on the box, or using slogans or beautiful photos, their products were brandless. They would include just the name of the food, in black text, on a white background. This minimalist design was a brilliant marketing tool. It delivered the message that the food was cheap, and the savings were being passed down to consumers. Then generic branding spread around the world. Podcast Episode Buy The 99% Invisible City

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. You probably have a favorite local TV ad. Something that's low budget with lots of graphics and terrible music. And it stars a fun, charismatic, in-your-face local business owner. Like New York's favorite stereo salesman, Crazy Eddie. It's a crazy Eddie Christmas in August. Audio, blowout blitz. Crazy Eddie's gonna save you a blizzard of bucks on stereo rec systems, comeback display as portable stereo.

Or the Martin Furniture Guy. Hi, Martin M. Dramat for the Martin Furniture Store. We owe this furniture business in Indiana. And our prices are out of this world. But if you grew up in Toronto in the 1980s, you probably know our local supermarket guy, Dave Nichol. By contrast, he was extremely low-key. That's producer and notable Canadian, Chris Barupé.

Dave Nichol might be the most milk-toast guy to appear on television. He had these big wireframe glasses and this dome of brown hair and a prominent southern Ontario accent. In the past few weeks, there's been a lot of shouting about lower grocery prices. Recently, the major newspapers in Toronto and Ottawa compared prices at the major supermarkets. In both surveys, lobloas had the lowest prices.

In the 80s, Nickel helped run a grocery store chain called lobloas, which makes me giggle just to sand. They had an inexpensive line of products they called the no name brand, which Nickel would sell in a series of sleep-inducing commercials. For example, these brand name pickles are almost twice as expensive as no name. Why is it then that in many supermarkets you find the national brand and one of the other jacuzzi? In these ads, Nickel would sit on a stool in front of a black background, and he would

just talk. That was it. Though sometimes for added excitement, he'd include his dog in the ad. This is not ET. This is Georgie Girl, and she's a French bulldog. These discount ads were part of a strategy. The ads were notably plain, just like the products, because no name had basically no package design. If you bought no name cookies, here's what you get.

A box was some cookies inside. Which, you know, I guess that's what you always get. But in this case, the box had a plain background with black text that said chocolate chip cookies. And that was it. There was no name peanut butter, no name detergent, no name orange juice, all of it was dirt cheap. And LaBlaz wasn't unique. It was one of the many supermarket chains across North America that was riding a generic product craze in the late 70s and the early 80s. But LaBlaz took it further than anyone. Their generic marketing plan changed the way we eat and shop. And ironically, their strategy to go brandless became one of the most successful branding campaigns.

About a hundred years ago, we really didn't have supermarkets. If you went shopping, you had to go to the green grocer, and the butcher, and then someone delivered your milk, and it was so, so time consuming. But in 1916, Clarence Saunders opened a store in Tennessee called Piggly Wiggly, which was the first place with self-service groceries, rows and rows of products that you could pick out yourself. Soon, America was overrun with grocery stores. After World War II, these stores were filled

with famous national brands. A couple of factors helped the big brands take over, like the new Interstate Highway system, which made it easy to deliver goods. And of course, the rise of television. When you have your way, you start every day. With shallows, the Red Magic. Think about the cereal aisle, soft drinks, cleaning the church and proctor and gamble, Nabisco, general foods. Those were the biggest advertisers in the post-war era.

They really are the big spenders and the big spenders were the brands advertisers in the post-war era. They really are the big spenders and the big spenders were the brand's most people wanted. This is my favorite marketer, Terry O'Reilly. And I am the host of Under the Influence, which is a CBC radio show and podcast, and I am a 40-year ad man. O'Reilly says, back at the advent of TV, telling people about your new product was pretty easy.

If you had the money to buy commercials on the biggest shows. It was a time when you could buy, you had Sullivan show and Bonanza and maybe Gunsmoke back in the 60s and by buying just those three programs, you would be reaching 80% of America in Canada. The name brands became dominant. They were most of what people bought at grocery stores in North America. To fill out the shelves, supermarkets would make their own store brand products too. Often, these look kind of like the big brands, with the name of the supermarket slapped

on the side of the box. Store brands were mostly popular with people who wanted a low budget alternative to the name brand stuff. They wanted to buy something that was, you know, not as good, but not as expensive. This is Stephen Hoek. He's an emeritus marketing professor at the Wharton School. And he says store brands weren't always the highest quality, but many of them were close enough to the name brands, mainly because a lot of grocery store products

are easy to make. Take, for example, cornflakes. What do you need? You need some machine that can spit out corn batter and into some machine that nukes it and all of a sudden it's a cornflake. So there's always a bunch of manufacturers that can do it.

And you know, for instance, shampoo. Anybody can make shampoo. You know, anybody can make shampoo all you need is a bathtub and some chemicals and some bottles. But the store brands weren't big sellers until they received a boost in the late 1970s. After the oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. Unemployment hit 11 percent and suddenly middle class families didn't have money for name brands like Coke or Kellogg's. Consumers want a cheaper food. In response, there was a new demand for low-cost store brands.

One chain in France called Carifor was developing one of these discount brands when they had this idea. Instead of using bright colors or putting their name on the box or using slogans, you know, branding, their products would be brand less, just the name of the food and black text on a white background. This minimalist design was a brilliant marketing tool. It delivered the message that, this is cheap. We're cutting costs and we are passing the savings down to you. This is bare bones and you're having a hard time coping here because maybe you're unemployed or whatever.

And so here is a way that you can substitute away from a more expensive product and still satisfy your kids when they wake up in the morning. They want some cereal for breakfast. In 1976, Cara for launched the new product line, which they called Le Proudouille Libra, which means in English, free products, which, you know, they weren't actually free, but these products were 20-30% cheaper than everything else at the store. And it worked. Soon, the Proudouille Libra were a hit. Versus story executives from North America were actually flying to Europe just to check

out Kerafore and see what the hype was about. Soon, the Proudwe Libra idea was being copied by everybody. Stephen Hoek says, at first, it was a bit of a shock. I just had moved to Chicago and the big grocery chain there was called Jewel. I remember going to the store and all of a sudden, I saw these black and white packages. It was black type on a white package for every single one of those things. So it said napkins and that was it. It's like a minimalist heaven. Chain stores like Jewel, in Chicago, and Ralph's in California were packaging and selling their own generic products. In many stores, the generic products were given a separate aisle. This helped promote their novelty,

but it also prevented shoppers from comparing them side-by-side with the nicer-looking brand name products. But one Canadian grocery store took this idea of generic branding to a whole new extreme. And the catalyst was the man a lot of Canadians knew from local TV ads, the president of LaBla's supermarkets, Dave Nichol. Dave Nichol wasn't born rich, but he was a man of refined tastes. He went to Harvard Law School, he loved to fly first class, and he personally knew the chefs

at many of the three star restaurants in Europe. Dave Nichol was friends with Galen Weston, who was from one of the richest families in Canada. The Weston's owned law laws, and they tapped Dave Nichol to help run the company, even though he had no experience running a supermarket. At the time, law laws was in a really bad place. They were trailing way behind their competitor, the grocery chain, Dominion.

Law laws was closing stores, laying off workers. The only thing Loblaws had going for it was a celebrity pitchman, a William Shatter. Hey, right now, Loblaws is having a huge frozen food sale. It's frozen vegetables, frozen meat on trays, frozen concentrated juices, ice cream. If it's frozen, you can save plenty. Don't get left out on the cool. Nichol saw the Los Ails and the stores closing and he decided we need to change things up.

So La Blas took care of for his discount branding idea and they ran with it. They launched no name. It was just like the black and white generics you could find in America and Europe. But the La Blas products had one big design flourish. He hired a great designer named Don Watt, who just chose yellow, stark banana yellow, and just big chunky, helvetica type. Yellow feels like a discount color. I guess like it's

cousin orange. And I think Don Watt really chose yellow because it was a color least used by big brands. It was almost like Orwellian, no romance in it. The Nickel didn't just launch the product line. He made it an entire store. The worst performing law-blow stores were shut down and rebranded as no frills. These new stores carried very few name brands. It was dominated by no name products. To make this painfully clear, the entire store was painted black and bright yellow. The first no frills opened in Toronto in 1978.

Dave Nichol was actually doing a TV interview when he found out what certain customers thought about the color scheme. What do you think of the problem, man? The color outside is loasy. What do you think the problem is? The color outside is loasy. What do you think about the price to check the price? No, I haven't checked the price yet. It was a real bargain-bent experience.

People had to bag their own groceries. And while the products were cheaper, some customers expressed ambivalence about the new store. There's no butcher, no bakery, no frozen food, no air conditioning, no fancy displays, and not even much choice of products. But what it does have is customer. How do you like packing, having to pack your own bag?

Don't like it. All right, I didn't want to, was to have a bag. I'll bring my own next time. You'd come back next time? Well, of course. When the news store opened, Dave Nicholl had replaced William Shatner as the face of the company. And he launched the bland new ad campaign,

which sent a pretty clear message about what Law Bloss was offering. You don't have to pay for the mass advertising and all the design work and all the marketing that goes on behind the jar of jam. All you should be paying for is the jam. And Nick will call that brand tax. The news doors were a success.

It turns out a lot of consumers didn't want to pay the brand tax. They didn't want the bells and whistles. And in America, by the early 1980s, billions of dollars in generic products were being sold every year. As they got more popular, it's clear the generic products were becoming exactly the thing they were supposed to be rebelling against. A no-name brand is a brand. Surprise! It is presented to the public as a non-brand, meaning a viable choice to big name brands. But in itself, a generic product is a brand. You're appealing to people or to shoppers who think that people who do pay for big brands

are foolish, when they could have the same thing and just not pay for the advertising, not pay for the fancy label. The generic brand was so powerful by the early 80s, it was showing up on the fringes of pop culture in the sci-fi movie repo man it was used as this great visual joke about how the world was becoming more and more conformist in the movie Emilio Estevez works in a grocery store that is slowly crushing his soul and only stocks generic products in One scene Estevez eats out of a can, simply labeled food. Put it on a plate, son. You'll enjoy it, your wife.

You'll enjoy it anymore, mom. Mmm, mmm, mmm. This is swell. Generic products were featured in a music video by the band's suicidal tendencies, and there was a whole series of books, Freelidly called No Freels Books. I thought of it as a satire on publishing, if you could have No Freels' corn flakes,

why couldn't you have a No Freels romance? This is Terry Bisson, who edited the series, which was not affiliated in any way with the No Freels' store, but the cover was black and white to make it look like those generic grocery products. It's a No Frills book mystery and then it says, complete with everything. Detective, telephone, mysterious woman corpses, money, rain. And the science fiction is complete with everything. Aliens, giant ants, space cadets, robots, one plucky girl.

The No Real Series got positive reviews, including a feature in the New York Times book section. They got this enormous press attention because every newspaper in the country has, in those days, had a book editor or somebody that was supposed to look out for stuff. Well, they all thought it was a hoot. There was also a script for a no frills movie, which never got produced because, you know, you can only take this joke so far. In the early 80s, generics were a phenomenon, but the novelty couldn't last. And while the branding was clever, it couldn't hide the fact that some generic products,

well, they just weren't very good. The toilet paper, I mean, it just wasn't just in work, dude, it's job, you know? Steven Hoke says this happened with a lot of generic products. I tried a few things and they really just weren't, it wasn't worth it. And he wasn't alone in that opinion. Jim White was an executive at Lawbloss. On April 4th, 1984, I joined Dave Nichol. And Dave was always going on TV, teaching no-name products.

He was pitching the yellow and black product line, all of them being inferior to the National Brands and their only benefit was that they were cheaper than the national brand. It took me a couple of months to figure out that no name was no bueno. To bring down the price for generics, some sort of markets were cutting corners. Shoppers were finding cans full of bruised peaches in the generic section. I think nothing will kill a product faster than good marketing. So if you've got great marketing on your generic brands and then people are drawn to try it and it tastes terrible,

nothing will kill a product faster than that. Now to be clear, not all generic products were bad. Many of the generics were the same product as the brand names, just in different packaging. Loblaws actually used taste tests for their no-name products, but a couple of low-quality generics spoiled the whole bunch for a lot of customers. The recession ended,

and when the unemployment rate dropped, people went right back to the brand names. In a lot of ways, generic branding was out of step with the culture of the 1980s. That was really the era of over-exuberance and yuppiness and BMWs and big salaries and fancy clothes and electronics. I think that era for whatever reason in the 80s was about spending money. With consumerism dominating culture, buying generics became embarrassing.

Lots of American supermarkets gave up on the generic experiment, but in Canada, law laws didn't get rid of no name. They just moved it lower down the shelf, and they created a second product to attract the yuppies. Here's Jim White again. I think what in my own mind was, I wanted to go after the more affluent shopper. We should create the first premium private label program in North America. It didn't exist.

It only existed in my head. So premium private label is another term for a nicer quality store brand. Basically, Loblaws wanted to make a storebrand that was affordable, but felt luxurious. Jim White remembers talking about it with his boss, Dave Nichol. He said, what do you think we should call it? And this guy Dave had a very large ego. He was very pleased with himself. And knowing that, I simply said to him, I think we should call it President's Choice. And then he rose and he said, yes, do it! The packages for President's Choice were definitely nicer to look at. They were also designed by

Don Wad and his team, and they used lots of color. They had these pictures on the front that resembled the Photos in Gourmet magazine. Oh, and the logo was the words President's Choice in Dave Nichols handwriting. The products even had fancy names. They didn't carry macaroni and cheese. They had white cheddar deluxe macaroni and cheese. That's deluxe with an E. Their Oreo imitator was called Lucullin Delights, named after the Heedness Roman General Lucullus. They eventually had to change the name on that one because nobody understood the reference.

Dave Nichol was still doing TV ads and talking directly to customers. But now, instead of focusing exclusively on rock bottom prices, Nichol also talked about his world travels in search of gourmet flavors. Every year I take two or three extended trips, let's say to Singapore or Taballi, and usually because of the length of the distances we lay over in Hong Kong. And so I've spent a lot of time in the restaurants of Hong Kong, and I think one of the flavors

that has always intrigued me. Lobos was spending a lot of money on research and development so that their new food would live up to all these fancy product names. Jim White even spent months trying to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie. It took nine months just to make the chocolate. And this new super cookie would be called the decadent. And then we launched it and you know, history was made. It seems so odd to say that in hindsight,

that a cookie could be so powerful in the marketing of an entire grocery chain. But it happened. So if you tasted that cookie at that time, it was mind-blowing. The decadent quickly became a best seller. And soon, Dave Nicholene's Law Bloss team were hired to develop new fancy

store brands for big supermarkets across America. He was eventually revered across North America as a great grocery merchandiser at marketer because even Sam Walton hired Dave Nichol to come and consult on his private label, Grans. Even a company as big as Wal-Mart was trying to pick Dave Nichols' mind at that stage. Walmart rolled out its own version of President's Choice called Sam's Choice. And after leaving Loblaws, Jim White helped create premium private labels all over the world.

Wegmans and Walmart and Safeway and bonds and stop and shop, finest and Fred Meyer and Myers, a creative products for all of them. Today, one in four products sold in American supermarkets are store brand. And that's partly because more of those store brands follow the president's choice model. These products all have colorful packages and aspirational names like signature farms or market cafe. They look fancier even if they cost less than the national brands. The message for generic products used to be, this product is just good enough.

Now the message is, you were a discerning shopper who's looking for a more curated product experience. Entire supermarkets like Trader Joe's are built around this principle here to Steven Hook. If you kind of look at store brands versus national brands, you know, store brands are given the national brands in most product categories are real run for their money. And the reason why is because they're just about as good. The minimal generic products, you know, the ones that just say cereal on the outside and

black text, those are a lot harder to find in America now. But in Canada, those products are still going strong. In 2009, during the last big recession, no name had an upswing in sales. And at the beginning of the pandemic, there were lines down the block outside of no-feril stores in Toronto. Because when the economy is bad, that's when more people turn to a store like no-ferils. I mean, imagine right now how appealing that pitch is to people who have lost their jobs, the venacity salary cuts as everybody self isolates.

Even now that pitch is resident. Jim White said to me, his company started with no name, but it graduated to President's Choice. And that makes sense. Generic brands and nicer private labels, they've always been pitched as opposite. When you think about it, they're really selling you the same thing.

Both of them are saying, you, you aren't swayed by brand name marketing. You're too smart for that. And really, that's one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book. Now the price of bread in Canada affects the US presidential election after this. Okay, so I'm here with Chris Baroube, Hey, Gris. Hey, how's it going, Roman? I'm doing pretty well. We're under blankets or in closets talking to each other. We are. It is, there's always a distance between us,

but it's more absurd when I see you under the blanket and you see me in front of all of my shirts. Exactly. Exactly. So you have a little addition to this story. So let's let's talk about them. I do. So since I I've been reporting this story for a while and since I started no frills and wobblers have actually been in the news quite a bit. So I wanted to do kind of a round up of all of the Canadian grocery store news that has happened since I started working on this story. And stay with us because it trust me, it gets really exciting. But first things first, Roman, I sent you a clip from the episode and I think we need to talk about it before we do anything

else. So could you play the clip? Got it. Okay. Here we go. He hired a great designer named Don Watt who just chose yellow, stark banana yellow, and just big chunky, he'll medic a type. Yellow feels like a discount color. I guess like it's cousin orange. Roman, when I was talking to Terry O'Reilly, he's a very persuasive man.

And when he said black and yellow feels like a discount color scheme, at first I was like, oh yeah, he's totally right. And then it occurred to me that is also the color scheme of the show 99% visible. It's no problem. I sort of think of it that we're, we're black with yellow. So, you know, so that we, we was light edge. That feels right. I mean, this actually brings me into the first news item

about no frills. Last year, no frills launched this huge ad campaign. So for a brief time, that bright banana yellow and the black heavettica font basically took over the city of Toronto. So if you were walking around, you would see it everywhere. So I've sent you a couple of photos. I want you to open up the first one. Okay. This is great. So this is like an old building has a sort of man-served roof.

Like a single section of the old building is just painted yellow. It says the word building on it. Yeah. So for a while, this was everywhere. This was a blanket campaign to get people aware of no frills. So I've sent you another one. Actually, if you want to open up the second one, I describe that too. This is also like a takeoff of the no name label and it says no name and it says it's a big yellow wall and it says subway platform with assorted commuters and trains. So this was the strategy of the ad campaign they put out last year was to basically embrace the irony. They also watched this like ironic Twitter campaign. At one point, they live tweeted the golden globes, and one of the tweets from that was an actor has won an award like they really have doubled down on kind of the ironic elements of their brand. Right. Right. You know, some people found

that really delightful. Like I don't know, how do you feel seeing all of that? I think it's great. It's really like, you know, it taps into nostalgia, which I'm always a little bit nervous about. But I think it brought greater joy into the world. And so I'm always in favor of greater joy. I think that's right. But there was also some backlash to this ad campaign.

What could possibly make people mad about this ad campaign? So the main argument, this was coming from people who are working in food security. So this is largely from advocates who were saying, look, no frills is a discount brand. It's not really funny, right? Like, to them, the yellow and black packaging recalls, you know, scarcity recalls, times when you didn't have a lot of money. So for them, it kind of really clashed with the ironic embrace of the silliness of the packaging.

I don't know if there's an inherent quality of making fun of the fact that it's discount in these things. So I don't know. And I guess the flip side of it is also that if you are taking this kind of ironic funny tone, maybe it takes away some of the stigma. If there is any stigma of buying like a discount grocery store. So I think on the whole like that at campaign is pretty good.

Yeah, yeah. I agree. So this kind of brings us to the second news item about Canadian grocery stores. So this one is actually about the parent company of No Forels and Pop Quiz. You remember the name of the parent company NoFrills. I do love laws. It is love laws. So, lawbloss has been getting a lot of bad press recently and part of that is because, of course, COVID-19 has made all of these people who work at grocery stores front-line workers.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. Of course. And at the beginning of the pandemic, law blas and lots of other companies announced that they were giving grocery store workers a raise of $2 an hour. It was basically hazard pay for people going in to their jobs who had to go in so that we had a food supply that was secure. Well, then in June, law blas announced that they had decided to end the hazard pay. What they were saying was that we can't afford

to keep paying people at a higher rate. And a lot of people were mad about that partly because law bluffs earnings have gone up because more people are going to the grocery store during the pandemic. So that has been this big story. And as a result, there have actually been some workers who have been striking at supermarkets that are owned by law bluffs. It's well with the rights. It's absolutely like not any less dangerous than it was when this thing started. And so it makes total sense to me that they would keep their hazard pay to keep feeding

a nation, which is of critical importance. So I wish them the best of luck. Well, Roman, this brings us to the third news item about lawblas. It's also kind of a negative story about Loblaws, but I think you'll agree. It's quite a bit funnier. It's the great Canadian bread price fixing scandal. So obviously know about this, right? I must admit that I missed most of that.

This is kind of a complicated news item, but follow me here because there's a lot of twists and turns and it involves the American presidential election. Oh, okay. So Roman, do you know what price fixing is? a lot of twists and turns and it involves the American presidential election. Oh, okay. So Roman, do you know what price fixing is? It means basically different competitors are all agreeing on a price. They're flouting the market and making a higher price for consumers. It's illegal, right?

Like that's anti-competitive behavior. What happened in 2017 is that the competition Bureau of Canada announced that for 14 years, Canadian grocery stores had been teaming up to inflate the price of bread. So this was a big scandal. Loblaws admitted that they had a hand in this and they agreed that they had to make good. They were very sorry for what they had done. So they were going to give a $25 gift certificate to anybody who wanted it, who shopped at Loblaws. And that's it for 14 years of making people pay higher prices for bread. You got $25.

A lot of people obviously were very mad because they were like, wow, this seems like a huge scandal. So this was a big new story in Canada. A lot of people got their $25 gift cards and it died down. And then this year, the story came back up in the news. And that's because Pete Buttigieg ran for president. Okay, so please close the loop on this for me because I have no idea what you're talking about. This isn't logical for you, but...

Uh, so you remember Pete Buttigieg? Of course, I remember Pete Buttigieg. I had some affection for Pete Buttigieg, of course. Yeah, sure. Mara Soutman, Indiana, military veteran. Yeah. So, Mar Pete, when he was running, there was some criticism of one of his previous jobs, which was that he was a business consultant for McKinsey. So, McKinsey is one of these companies

that goes in, offers advice on how businesses can run more efficiently. And there's a lot of pressure on Mara Pete to divulge what work he had been doing for McKinsey. So, he gave out this list of like, here's all the clients that I consulted on for McKinsey. And one of them was take a wild guess. It was love laws. It was love laws. Yeah, hell yeah. Here is the actual wording of the press release

that Mayor Pete put out. He said he was a consultant with love laws on the effects of price cuts on various combinations of items across hundreds of stores. Oh my goodness. So when this came out and people started piecing together the timeline, there were all these Canadians saying,

hey, wait a second, was Mayor Pete the reason that our bread costs so much money for years? Was he part of that? Lobla says no. And Mayor Pete's campaign said, we have no idea what you're talking about. What is this bread price scandal? But it became this controversy and he kept getting asked about it. In fact, when he was

doing his big interview with the New York Times editorial board, it was one of the big questions. So I have sent you this video link. Have you seen this video before? I have not seen it. So let me watch it. So let's let's play it. You've been on the front lines of corporate downs it. You've been on the front lines of corporate downsizing. You've been on the front lines of corporate price fixing. You've been on the front lines of our misadventures of our misadventures in foreign policy. You've had direct experience of many of the things

that make a lot of young people very angry about the way that this country is operating right now. You don't seem to embody that anger. So the proposition that I've been on frontlines of corporate price fixing is, just to get that out of the way. You worked for a company that was fixing bread prices? No, I worked for a consulting company

that had a client that may have been involved in fixing or was apparently in a scandal. I was not aware of the Canadian bread pricing scandal until last night. Wow, that's quite a scandal. I was not aware of the Canadian bread pricing scandal until last night. Wow, that's quite a moment. Yeah. Yeah. So it was published in the New York Times this whole exchange about the bread price fixing scandal. And it was probably the most emotion Mayor Pete showed on the campaign trail. And I have no evidence that the great Canadian bread price fixing scandal torpedoed his candidacy, but I mean, that didn't help. That wasn't a good moment in his campaign.

That's amazing that it had such a huge effect. And what a bizarre footnote to this story of law, blossom bread. I know. And hey, look, I know a couple months ago, and I pitched, I want to do this story about Canadian grocery stores that maybe there wasn't the intrigue of other things you done the show. But I mean, I think with all of these news items, what you see is that grocery stores are mundane, they're very everyday, but they also affect us.

Like the thing with everyday things is they really have an impact on our lives. There's so much of people's lives that are tied to these grocery stores, even though we kind of take them for granted, there's just so much going on there. Yeah. Oh, just for the record, I was always sold on this. I know you were sold. I feel like though, tell like other people I'm doing a story about Canadian grocery stores might not have been

the bombshell dynamite pitch. I mean, I think the fact that the pitch included a clip of repo man was enough for me to a green light it. So I really appreciate it Chris, thanks so much. Absolutely, everybody go watch repo man. Thanks, Roman. 99% invisible was produced this week by Chris Barube, Music by Sean Riel, Sound Mix by Sarah McCarthy. Special thanks this week to Linda Burbank, the YouTube channel Retro Ontario, the archival

team at CBC Radio, and the late great journalist Anne Kingston. And thanks to Terrio Riley, whose newest podcast is called, We Regret to Inform You. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall. Kurt Colestead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Le, Abby Madon, Katie Mingle, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco

and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered across the North American continent but will always be in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. We have all kinds of new merch in the 99PI store, including a Mabyee masks and t-shirts

with finiculars on them. Plus links to purchase the brand new book. It's called the 99% Invisible City. It's out October 6th. All that. And more at 9i9pi.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.

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