EAT ME

And I Frowned at the Crumbs of a Crust of Bread

Third generation grocery scion Galen Weston has admitted his family-run conglomerate of retail outlets, food processing plants and bakeries have been inflating the price of bread across Canada for 14 years. He is very contrite and swears that his employees who engineered the scheme no longer work for him in any capacity. Naturally, he had no knowledge of their activities and as such will keep his royal blood title with Loblaw Companies Ltd., his head, and his rap sheet pristine.

It has been speculated that the miracle manna which sustained the Israelites on their exodus from Egypt was a type of bread. “Give us this day our daily bread.” The world famous Bavarian purity laws were not decreed for the greater glory of beer nor quality control. Limiting a brew’s ingredients kept demand for grains aside from barley low thereby reducing costs for bakers. The fourth Earl of Sandwich, on a gambling jag, demanded “some meat between some bread” so he could eat without fuss and keep playing. Revolutions are not ignited by a single spark, but surely the inflated price of a loaf of bread did not work in the favour of France’s remote and removed aristocracy. “Let them eat cake.” In the last weeks of his life, the late musician Warren Zevon advised television talk show host David Letterman and his live studio audience to “Enjoy every sandwich.”

Loblaw has had some very bad ink in the business pages of the newspapers lately. Stores will be closed this year, 22 of them, their locations secret; naturally some long term employees must be shown the automatic EXIT door. Vendors have been pole-axed by significant and arbitrary invoice processing fees. Now the rat fink who’d been living large lapping up the purposely spilt flour on the bakery floor has cut a deal with the authorities, crumbs both for the good cop and the bad cop in the interrogation cell.

The squealer sang for his self-preservation. He fingered rival grocery banners as complicit in the scheme even though they don’t possess the resource of granddad’s massive baking operations to fix prices. In fact, he sells his expensive bread to his competitors.

The admission of guilt is followed by a pathetic mea culpa, a paltry public relations exercise hinging on the distribution of $25 Loblaw gift cards. Because, really, how many loaves of bread would the average household consume over the course of 14 years? Who can know because even the most insane of anal retentive grocery shoppers will not hoard 14 years’ worth of receipts. The cynical beauty of the complimentary SORRY! cards is something to behold: online registration will provide Loblaw key customer data; the cards will drive traffic to Loblaw stores; nobody ever spends the exact amount of a gift card; finally, usage may deprive hasty disgruntled consumers from sharing in the infinitely more lucrative proceeds of a successful class action lawsuit.

Fixing the price of a global human staple takes a gallon of casual, entitled arrogance chased down by a quart of unmitigated gall. This is James Bond villainy. This is worse than Coca-Cola selling your free tap water back to you in a branded, tinted plastic bottle. Our daily bread is as real as it gets, not as abstract as a software-rigged Volkswagen diesel emission test result. Canadians have been gouged by a corporation who had the means to do it and who had no ethical dilemma about doing it until it was apparent they were going to get nabbed for doing it. Many Canadians have already queued in the Loblaw digital bread line; starting next week they can expect to receive their crummy apology.