Editor, 

One of the giant grocer chains has yet again squeezed down what it will honour with regards to price matching as well as the purchase or loyalty points it offers. Since 2023, the points offerings I’d previously received were cut in half: from 200 points per $1 spent (before taxes when it’s applicable), to only 100 per $1 spent. One hundred points translate into 10 cents.
 
This, while the chain along with other giant grocer corporations have been raking in record profits, year after year, while a record number of people have to choose between which necessities of life they can afford. To say it feels unfair is an understatement, but what can I or most other shoppers realistically do about it?
 
There still are many Canadians who hold the erroneous notion that they live and buy in a nation with truly competitive and therefore consumer-fair markets. But, in reality, big corporations are able to get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government oversight rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting concentrated ownership — especially in regards to corporations selling and profiteering from the necessities of life, notably food. Those rules, however, are largely unenforced by the government.
 
I feel that the heavily corporatized mainstream news-media, which is virtually all of it, has been editorially emasculated, thus negligent when it comes to regularly investigating and exposing such societally consequential oversight-rule breaking.
 
I see this as a problematically large part of a corpocratic existence fuelled by elected officials getting indebted thus beholden to huge corporate entities, particularly due to their generous political monetary donations.
 
Meanwhile, way too many people, perhaps an all-time-high percentage, have to choose between which necessities of life they can afford. A very large and growing populace are increasingly too overworked, tired, worried and even rightfully angry about food and housing unaffordability, thus insecurity for themselves or their family — largely due to insufficient income — to criticize or boycott Big Business/Industry for the societal damage it needlessly causes/allows, particularly when not immediately observable. And I doubt that this effect is totally accidental, as it greatly benefits the interests of insatiable corporate greed.
 
The more that such corporations make, all the more they want — nay, need — to make next quarterly. It’s never enough, yet the news-media will implicitly celebrate their successful greed, a.k.a. "stock market gains."
 
At the same time, corporate officers will shrug their shoulders and defensively say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests. And, of course, the shareholders also will shrug their shoulders and state they just collect the dividends and that the big bosses are the ones who make the decisions involving ethics or lack thereof.
 
It really seems there's little or no human(e)/moral accountability when the biggest profits are involved, perhaps even inversely proportionally so. Nor can there be a sufficiently guilty conscience if the malpractice is continued, business as usual. ‘We are a capitalist nation, after all,’ the morally lame self-justification may go.
 
Still, there must be a point at which corporate greed thus practice will end up hurting big business’s own monetary interests. Or is the unlimited-profit objective/nature somehow irresistible? It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.
 
Frank Sterle Jr., White Rock