Great list. In my area, I only need to avoid Maxi and Provigo.
There are so many small "dépanneurs" and specialty grocery stores.
They all have amaizing deals on their niche products:
- rice, lentils, dehydrated beans, spices, chili, bitter gourd >>>> indian store
- rice, sauces, noodles, mushroom, fish/seafood, daikon >>>> asian store
- beans, spices, coconut, plantain, okra, eddo leaf >>>> jamaican store
- arabic, latin american, senegalese, etc. grocery stores in addition to bakeries, fish mongers, butcher shops, etc.
Every speciaty store has their own fresh produces from typical fruits and vegetables we see everywhere to uniques ones found nowhere else.
I am of the opinion that it will help Québec in the long run and give local companies some breathing room to innovate, test, fail, iterate, refine and discover better way to ship to customers (I pray for something better than Intelcom/Dragonfly 🙏🤣 ).
Amazon just dropped a huge marketshare of online purchases in Québec (51% of total value in dollars), they almost had the control on how local businesses would have to reach customers online and suck every profit out of each transactions.
Moreover, Amazon will now have to deal with higher rate of return, damaged and lost packages while on less than stellar delivery (I blame specifically Intelcom).