The World This Hour - The World This Hour for 2025/02/09 at 07:00 EST

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

The World This Hour for 2025/02/09 at 07:00 EST

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But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together, we can turn grit into greatness. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. The price of food, and this is what he said. The retailers aren't being greedy. The costs are real. The costs have gone up.

They're shouldering them. You've also seen like there's massive theft going on right now. That's them shouldering it, right? I, like as a distributor, I don't have to worry about that. And I'm just being very honest, the retailers are getting a bit of a bad rap right now. I mean, there is massive cost inputs on their side that people aren't talking about, but we're only talking about the side that, well, I used to pay $4 for product X and now Loblaws or Sobeys is charging $5.

Wow, that's greedy. It really isn't. Their cost increases have kind of reflected the input costs of anybody dealing with food. That was the comment from Patrick Hefferman. Tyler, that seems to fall in line what you were saying. But if I could just push back for a moment, I think some of what people like Sheena are talking about is things like, you know, you open up the paper and you'll read things like Loblaw's paying a CEO $22 million in 2023 as a bonus at a time when people are experiencing an inability to feed themselves and that that is feeling like money that came from what they paid at the cash. Partly it is, but Loblaw's that gets picked on a lot is a big business.

They've got a financial institution that's part of it. They've got pharmacies and other things. And so again, I think that people are conflating a couple of different things all happening at the same time. Again, when you look at that dollar of food that somebody's paying, often salaries and benefits is the biggest single component of it. More than half of what you're paying is probably going to pay for somebody's salary. Some of that may go to gail and weston but a lot of that goes to the cashiers that are working at the grocery store that are the truck drivers that are driving the trucks and the farmers that are growing the food.

What we need to find our ways so that all of those people can get paid more and again again, it's one of the challenging situations that we're in. By and large, we should have people that are working in agriculture and food processing making more money, but that all makes the food more expensive. Again, Galen Weston's paycheck, I think, has got a lot of attention, but there's a lot of other things that are happening underneath it. And one of the things that I think is worth highlighting Food manufacturing is our largest single manufacturing Sector in Canada. We often don't realize that we don't appreciate that And so more Canadians are employed manufacturing food than they're employed

Manufacturing other things and so again, it's the cost of them and we want to make sure that they've all got good high-paying jobs as well Sheena, thank you so much for that question. Donna canning is joining us from Orangeville, Ontario. Hi Donna. What's your question? Hi this Question is great after your last commenters My question is that why do I pay a dollar 99 for 10 pounds of potatoes? $1.99 for 10 pounds of potatoes one week and $6 the next, and then I have to wait another perhaps four weeks until they come back to $1.99. And this happens with every product, the same with meat, the same with dairy. They fluctuate so high and low, and I think that adds to our food insecurity. People don't know when to buy what and how to manage their budgets.

But Tyler, do you have an answer for Donna? Yeah. And the short answer is it's competition. And what we see are retailers using those loss leader products. They put very big discounts on products to try and differentiate themselves from others as a way to attract people into the stores. And that's part of the marketing strategy that they use. It also highlights this reality that you can often find

deals on products if you're willing to put the time and effort to look, but as the caller noted, you know, it gets to be an issue. Try to manage all of that and manage the fluctuations in prices, but it is all of that and manage the fluctuations in prices. But it is part of that competitive landscape. And one of the things that we've seen over the last couple of years we've paid more attention to

is that these are cyclical, the retailers put more competition, more deals on it at certain times of the years. But that can also be a pressure on the farmers that are raising those potatoes, because as retailers want to try and put more products on more of a discount, they go back then to the producers of those products saying, no, no, no, we can't give you a price increase

because we can't make pay you, potato farmer, more for your potatoes.