How bad do you guys have it over in Canada in terms of cost of living crisis?

It’s hard to boycott the price gouging bastards when it’s just 3 companies owning the entire market of what you literally need to buy every week to live.

The best I can do is make maximum use of my local farmer’s market but it’s closed for the season now. Which is a bummer because not only it was cheaper, but the produce was fresher and of higher quality.

You can order food online from Well, Co-op & Costco.

Bread is distressingly expensive because of price fixing.

Sobeys isn’t any better.

I have space, I keep 50lbs of AP flour, 100lbs of rice, 40 lbs of Maseca, and 40lbs of pizza flour.

Family of 4 goes through it all over the year and i re-buy. Then I make it a point to make stuff from each every week to keep costs down.

It’s not great.

The median mortgage payment is over 50% of the median income, which historically should be 30%. Houses are over 60%. But the numbers are getting better than their 2023 records highs.

Our biggest grocers were fixing bread prices for over a decade and were only given a slap in the wrist. People can ask for a $20 rebate.

Almost all of our grocery stores are owned by 3 companies (Loblaws, Metro, and Sobeys (made up of former Loblaws employees)). 3 companies own almost all our phone providers, so they gouge prices too.

You can really see a trend — we seem to concentrate all our industries into 3 or so companies and the competition bureau thinks that’s fine. Historically I think that’s because we were a colony and got too used to being exploited and having our wealth shipped off.

Which Canadian chain is better?

Giant Tiger probably

Seriously, we should do something as a society. We can’t let two companies (there are others, but please) manage all the food distribution in the country, it’s just terrible. Can’t we pass some legislation or something?

This is the way, though.

Grow your own = Insanely cheap, very easy, super delicious.

Farmer’s market = Cheap, convenient, super delicious and big.variety.

Friends with chickens = Delicious high quality free eggs offloaded onto you every week.

Grocery store = Low quality crap; twice the price. An unpleasant experience of other miserable people and awful music. A chore of a thing to do. The whole layout trying to be themed like a fancy farmer’s market but you can’t even find the plum vinegar!

100% Agree, I thankfully have a local grocery store close to me so I can avoid the big 3, but this isn’t a realistic option for everyone. I’m hesitant to just buy online for things like produce as my experience with them has been mediocre (I haven’t tried costco though).

This really isn’t a problem the everyday Canadian can fix without the government stepping in and breaking up the monopoly of Loblaws, Sobey’s and Metro.

I’d love to see a future Canada where there was more local grocery chains, with the same access to product that the big three have. Also would be great if they were closer to where people lives so people wouldn’t feel like the need to drive to get their groceries.

So envious of all of you that have cheap farmer’s markets. Where I am, my choices are

• Grocery store: cheap, highly variable quality, support the conglomerates
• Farmer’s market: expensive, probably higher quality, support local farmers

They’re so much fun to walk through though. If only I could actually afford to buy from them.

I wrote out a longer response but decided to summarise it as: it’s bad. Groceries are unaffordable, rent and mortgages in the cities are unaffordable and we don’t have the public transport infrastructure to support everyone’s commutes, utilities are overpriced. It’s pretty rough rn even as someone who’s household admittedly makes above average

Costco produce ordered online can be a bit hit or miss, unfortunately. You know how when you shop at Costco, it’s usually better to dig down a layer with produce since the top box always has everything that’s been rejected by someone else? I’d guess, based on our mixed success, that some Instacart shoppers just grab from the top of the pile. We’ve had some shops with bad produce, but most have been great.

What sucks is that if you return it to the warehouse, you don’t get the full price back because of the Instacart markup; on the either hand, you can sometimes return things at a net profit because of Instacart offers (like the $10/mo. Executive Members thing.)

Grow your own = Insanely cheap, very easy, super delicious.

Not going to be anywhere near enough food for one person unless you have more land available for yourself than people in a city or even most modern suburban developments are likely to have. Also takes a lot of time and effort if you want more than the occasional tomato, cucumber, lettuce head or zucchini to enrich your diet a bit. (Can be fun on a small scale, though.)

Farmer’s market = Cheap, convenient, super delicious and big.variety.

Nice, but takes a lot of planning, storage and home cooking to work out. You may need to start planning your life around when the farmer’s markets are and what they carry. Also, the variety is necessarily limited to what farmers in your area are growing.

Friends with chickens = Delicious high quality free eggs offloaded onto you every week.

Cool if you got those, but most people don’t.

We should have public run grocery chains. These companies are scum

Man superstore bread used to be perfect but they changed something and now it doesn’t have the extra fluffy inside and chewy crust but they change it back I won’t care about the price(mostly)

Valid concerns. I won’t ignore the orphan crushing machine and every situation is different, but a lot of food can be grown in an apartment.

I had a 300sqft bachelor pad in Vancouver where I managed to grow tomatoes, goji berries, greens and ALL the herbs. I kept my herbs in pots under a full spectrum light indoors, clipping and drying as they grew out. After set-up I only had to water, fertilize sometimes, and prune as needed. Greens, I kept harvesting young and re-seeding. Aside from watering, it took almost no effort to put a significant dent in my grocery bill.

Now, I have a 4x8ft fenced garden in a shared yard where I grow so much I barely buy produce in the summer. Aside from weeding, sprouting and transplanting in the spring, the main labour is watering, which only takes like five minutes. I get my seeds from things I eat or the public library seed share, so those are free, too.

I legit grew three pumpkins, four ziplock bags of sunflower seeds, beets, snap peas, opium poppies, carrots, tomatoes, gooseberries, strawberries and still have a herb shelf inside.

I get that’s still not a year’s worth a food, but it’s a lot for tiny bit of dirt, considering I knew nothing about gardening before.

Oh but get GMO pumpkin seeds. White mildew rot is a pain in the ass and everywhere. And a dehydrator if you don’t know how to deal with lots of food at once, you can make chips and crackers out of anything.

I’m pretty lucky in that my friends hunt, too, so I get a butt load of deer meat every fall.