Sticker Shock Nation. A City Grocery Store Won’t Fix It

Sticker Shock Nation. A City Grocery Store Won’t Fix It By Dale Jodoin Columnist Call it SSN. Sticker Shock Nation. That’s where we’re living now. You don’t walk into a grocery store anymore, you brace for it. You move slow, scan the tags, and hope you’re wrong. You’re not. The total climbs before you even hit the till. You cut items without thinking. Meat goes back. Extras disappear. You start choosing what to leave behind. This is the new habit, and it’s settled in. Across Canada, people are stretched thin. Rent is up. Gas is up. Food is up. It all piles on. Paychecks don’t move the way they used to. You can see it in the lines at Daily Bread Food Bank. More people show up every week. Not just people with no income. Working people. Seniors. Families with kids. Before we go further, clear this up. You’ll hear that city run grocery stores in the United States failed because of theft. That claim doesn’t hold. Most of the closures people point to were private stores, not government ones. In places like San Francisco, large retailers such as Target shut down locations after losses grew too high. Theft was part of it, along with high costs and lower traffic. The lesson is simple. When losses keep stacking up, even big, experienced companies can’t keep a store open. Now look at what’s being talked about here. In Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, the idea is a city run grocery store. Sell food at lower prices. Give people relief. It sounds good. It feels like action. But it skips a hard truth. Running a grocery store is not simple. You need trucks, coolers, shelves, staff, and a steady flow of food. Prices change fast. Food goes bad. Profit is thin even when things go right. Chains like Loblaw Companies Limited, Sobeys, and Metro Inc. have size and experience. They buy in bulk. They run tight systems. And even they feel the pressure. So ask the simple question. If it’s hard for them, how will a city do it better? And if it doesn’t work, who pays? You do. When a public store loses money, that loss does not vanish. It comes from taxes. There is no quiet loss. It shows up on your bill. It may not come right away, but it comes over time, in small ways that add up. Now look at what’s happening inside stores. More items are locked up. Meat, cheese, baby formula. Things that used to sit on open shelves now sit behind glass. There’s a reason. Theft. It’s not the main driver of high prices, but it adds pressure. Stores lose goods every day. Rising prices mean some people steal food to turn into cash for resale. A pack of beef isn’t just dinner anymore. That changes how people act, and it changes how stores run. Staff see the same faces come in. Someone takes something, gets stopped, and then comes back days later. There are reasons. Small charges. Busy courts. Limits in the system. But on the store floor, it feels simple. Nothing sticks. When that feeling spreads, things shift. More cameras. More guards. More locked shelves. Less trust. And once trust goes, everything gets harder. Prices creep up to cover losses. Stores spend more on security. Good customers pay more and get treated like suspects. It wears people down. It changes how people shop, and it changes how they feel about the place they rely on. Now take that same problem and drop it into a city run store. Does it go away, or does it follow the same path? If private companies are already dealing with rising losses and tight margins, a public store will face the same pressure on day one. The difference is who carries the risk. In a public model, the losses don’t sit with a company. They land on taxpayers. That means the bill doesn’t stop at the checkout. It shows up in taxes, fees, and cuts somewhere else. This isn’t about blaming people who are struggling. Anyone can see how tight things are. People are trying to eat, keep a roof over their heads, and get through the week. But a system still has to work. Prices have to make sense. Rules have to be clear. And those rules have to mean something. Right now, they don’t feel like they do. Prices keep climbing. Trust keeps slipping. And the answer being offered is to build a new store and hope it fixes it. Hope isn’t a plan. That’s the risk. If the same problems stay in place, high costs, weak control, and uneven follow up, the result will be the same. Only the bill will change hands. From the store to the taxpayer. Once that shift happens, it’s hard to turn back. Cities will not close these stores easily. Losses will be covered year after year. What starts as help can turn into a long bill that never goes away. So before we build something new, fix what we already have. Push for fair prices people can trust. Make sure rules are clear and applied the same way every time. Support stores so they can stay open without locking half their shelves. That’s where the real work is. People don’t need a new sign on a building. They need to walk into a store, pick up what they need, and not feel that knot in their stomach when they check the price. Right now, too many do. And until that changes, no new store, public or private, is going to fix what people feel when they shop. They feel alone in it, and they’re tired of carrying it.