Dear Editor, 

One of the giant grocer chains has yet again squeezed down on what it will honour with regards to price matching, as well as the purchase or loyalty points it offers.

Since 2023, the points offerings I’d previously received were cut in half: from 200 points per dollar spent (before taxes when it’s applicable), to only 100 points per dollar spent. Those 100 points translate into 10 cents. This comes as the chain, along with other giant grocer corporations, have been raking-in record profits year after year. At the same time, a record number of people have to choose which necessities of life they can afford. To say it feels unfair is an understatement, but what can I or most other shoppers realistically do about it?

There still are many Canadians who hold the erroneous notion that they live and buy in a nation with truly competitive and therefore consumer-fair markets. But in reality, big corporations are able to get even bigger, defying the very spirit of government oversight rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting concentrated ownership. This is especially true in regards to corporations selling and profiteering from the necessities of life, notably food. Those rules, however, are largely not enforced by the government.

I feel that the heavily corporatized mainstream news media, which is virtually all of it, has been editorially emasculated, thus negligent, when it comes to regularly investigating and exposing such socially consequential oversight-rule breaking.

I see this as a problem, and a large part of a corpo-cratic existence fuelled by elected officials getting indebted to huge corporate entities, particularly due to their generous political monetary donations.

Meanwhile, way too many people have to choose between which necessities of life they can afford. A very large and growing populace is increasingly too overworked, tired, worried and even rightfully angry about food and housing affordability for themselves or their family — largely due to insufficient income — to criticize or boycott Big Business/Industry for the societal damage it needlessly causes/allows. And I doubt that this effect is totally accidental, as it greatly benefits the interests of insatiable corporate greed.

The more that such corporations make, all the more they want — nay, need — to make next quarter. It’s never enough, yet the news media will implicitly celebrate their successful greed, a.k.a. ‘stock market gains’.

At the same time, corporate officers will shrug their shoulders and defensively say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests. And, of course, the shareholders also will shrug their shoulders and state they just collect the dividends and that the big bosses are the ones who make the decisions involving ethics or lack thereof.

It really seems there's little or no human(e)/moral accountability when the biggest profits are involved, perhaps even inversely proportionally so. Nor can there be a sufficiently guilty conscience if the malpractice is continued, business as usual. ‘We are a capitalist nation, after all,’ the morally lame self-justification may go.

Still, there must be a point at which corporate greed thus practice will end up hurting big business’s own monetary interests. Or is the unlimited-profit objective/nature somehow irresistible? It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.

Frank Sterle Jr.

White Rock, B.C.