meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Michael and Us

PREVIEW - #522 - The Everything Company (w/ David Moscrop and Mitchell Thompson)

Michael and Us

Luke Savage and Will Sloan

Tv & Film

4.6668 Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A new campaign to boycott Canada's biggest grocery chain raises a plethora of issues about how monopolies work in Canada, and what role governments and consumers should play in combatting them. On this special episode, Luke welcomes writers David Moscrop and Mitchell Thompson to discuss the Loblaws boycott and Canada's grocery-store oligarchs, the Weston Family. PATREON-EXCLUSIVE EPISODE - https://www.patreon.com/posts/103770757

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

We're here to talk about, to have a symposium of sorts on one of the most evil companies in Canada, a company that is really at the center of the political debate right now, and I think has rightly become a lightning rod for people's anger in the current political and economic moment.

0:17.6

We're here to talk about lob laws, which I'll just note from the latest reporting

0:22.1

at CBC. Apparently, they just had a shareholder meeting, and they're reporting $13.6 billion

0:27.5

in the first quarter. That's of revenue. Good for them. And that is, yeah, so an auspicious

0:33.8

start as this month, there is a popular subreddit loblaws is out of control which is

0:39.5

promoting a nationwide boycott of this company because yeah guess what grocery prices are

0:45.5

completely out of control here i actually don't know how this compares to other jurisdictions

0:50.1

if either of you guys know feel free to chip in with that but i mean this, this subreddit, which has over 50,000 people on it now, I mean, they've been cataloging for months. You know, it's like people going to these grocery stores and $30 fed of cheese. One of my favorite ones was just pieces of wood being sold for $10 a pop. Like not firewood, not useful wood, just pieces of wood.

1:14.5

$8 bags of chips, $37 chicken breast.

1:17.5

That's the kind of things we're dealing with here.

1:19.8

Now there's so much to talk about, and I can see you both are kind of vibrating as I

1:24.3

to get into this.

1:25.1

But maybe we can just actually begin with the boycott.

1:28.2

And here I want to bring in you, David, because you wrote a recent piece for the walrus

1:33.0

called Loblaws has become an everything company. And we're at the beginning of May now, this

1:38.2

boycott started. It is going to be a rather difficult boycott, I feel, to carry out effectively

1:43.1

because as the title of your

1:44.9

piece suggests, this company kind of just owns everything, and it's more than a grocery

1:50.3

company. So can you expound a bit on what Loblaws is, kind of what the scale of the company is,

1:56.4

and all of the different things that it now kind of has its fingers in. Yeah, and for American listeners,

2:02.2

I mean, this is like, imagine if Kroger's owned everything. Okay, so just imagine if, you know,

2:07.3

Kroger's owns everything and everywhere you go. It's a brand of or a subsidiary of Kroger's.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Luke Savage and Will Sloan, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Luke Savage and Will Sloan and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.