Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
I guess my question to you is where do you see the benefits coming from?
Empire Co (owner of Safeway and Sobeys) had sales of $31.4 billion and profits of $700 MM in the trailing twelve month period. So if your baseline is the government coule be as efficient as the private sector and could operate with zero profits you could drop food prices 2.2%.
Of course, they've invested ~$12 billion in property, plant and equipment to get that result, so to duplicate the real estate base you have to spend all that money first (and probably much more - not that likely their real estate has gone down in value...)
If you just want to subsidize people with tax dollars you can do that, but then why spend tens of billions setting up infrastructure - just use direct deposit.
And of course, the government isn't going to do all those bad things to boost profits, so the savings will be smaller. Then you have the cost of bureaucratic oversight and less aggressively negotiated labour contracts. Hard to see there being any savings at all.
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In my opinion, we need to expand the scope beyond just the grocery stores.
1) You would also be looking at food distribution. Sysco, Gordon Food, etc. Loblaw and Empire have their own distribution networks
2) You need to look at food sources. Address issues at the farm where corporations are putting patents on GM seeds to ensure that farmers need to buy from them or get sued.
3) Integration with other services. We have food services in schools and hospitals, instead of having private companies add more layers of cost you could have food move straight from the public food distributor to the public schools and hospitals.
You could even integrate into post-secondary education. SAIT already has their chef program where they cook food in class and then sell that food to people. There could be great opportunities to expand that and provide post-secondary training and internships for food distribution, cooking prepared meals to sell at endpoints (stores, schools, hospitals). You could even integrate agriculture education into the farms that the public system signs contracts with.
I think there is a lot of opportunity beyond just a public grocery store, which makes sense considering the Food Retail Net Income went up to over $6B when it was $~2.4B in 2019. $3B increase in annual net income over 5 years sounds like a huge opportunity to reduce costs.
The real estate investment is no joke but with the Safeway - Sobeys merger there are grocery stores available to buy and as I mentioned in my other post, you could incentivize apartment/condo builders to create public grocery stores within their builds if they are using the public loan/grant program to fund their project.
The investment may be significant but its not like food is going to stop being important to people.