this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Why state owned grocery stores?
Price gouging has been a major problem at Canadian grocers since COVID. Basically prices went up with supply chain issues / inflation but have not been adjusted for improvements in inflation since then.
These are for profit entities. They would steal a quarter from the poor and hungry if they could.
That's the fundamental flaw to capitalism - not that it concentrates wealth and power (because that is perhaps human nature) but that it celebrates it.
It conditions us to think that concentrating wealth is not only morally right but something we should all aspire to. That competing is morally superior to sharing.
Ultimately, if capitalists accrue so much wealth and power that they can buy out the interests that would seek to regulate them through democratic will, we then relinquish our democracy for feudalism.
I think that price gouging is mainly a result of allowing too much consolidation via buyouts and mergers, and not actively enough perusing antitrust and anti price fixing enforcement.
I suppose if it's allowed to get too bad, the government could try to compete in the market, but governments are almost never the most efficient way to do things and can rarely effectively compete on efficiency against a functioning open market. In my eyes, regulation of the open market via labor law, protecting unions, trust busting and anti collusion enforcement is a far better way for government to solve this problem.
Unfortunately a government that's not functioning well enough to do this kind of oversight will almost certainly fail at trying to compete against in the open market as a grocery store too. At which point you are just running subsidized food banks, which is also fine by me but I don't think subsidizing all food for everyone will work in most government budgets.
I think the problem is that the antitrust ship has already sailed.
I don't think a government run grocery store would be looking to compete on the open market. It would be more along the lines of subsidized food for lower income households on food stamps, practically speaking. That is much more sutainable than one that's open to the general public.
If a government run grocery store could provide a fair price for items we are currently being gouged on, I doubt they would be able to keep up with consumer demand. Essentially middle class and above will have to keep putting up with commercial prices.
I'm not sure what the difference is between this and just providing food stamps. I think food stamps would probably work out to be more efficient in the end unless for profit stores turn out to be massively inefficient.