Comments by "Pac Man" (@pacman3556) on "Food bank trucks going to Metro stores to pick up perishables" video.

Forcing grocery stores to donate excess food to food banks sounds good in theory but may actually backfire at helping people in need and lower income people (and even all consumers). If the govt forces grocery stores to start donating any excess inventory to food banks then grocery stores will stop "taking a risk" by bringing in a large amount of inventory that they may need to give away. They may start reducing the amount of inventory they carry which essentially cuts the amount of supply. Basic economics is when supply is cut but demand is not cut then prices increase. If stores stop carrying enough product for everyone then prices increase as more people "compete" for fewer goods. While it can be argued that grocery stores currently already throw out excess inventory so it shouldn't be any different whether it is thrown away vs given away by giving food away instead of throwing it away it creates an incentive for customers to not buy from the grocery store but wait until the grocery store donates it to the food bank then go get it for free from the food bank. In other words by throwing food away it reduces the supply available. By giving it away the supply is not cut it is just shifted from a store that sells it at a price to another outlet that sells it at a lower price (or in this case the food bank that gives it away at the price of zero). Another potential way to phrase what I am saying or look at it is currently food banks are in short supply so most people (maybe through altruism?) don't go to the food bank unless they absolutely need too. And if everyone did go to a food bank when it is in short supply then the food bank system would collapse. However if grocery stores start over supplying food banks it reduces the incentive for people to not go there (the "altruist" factor is removed) and the food bank becomes a good place to go to get free stuff. And with a vast supply the food bank is no longer at risk of collapsing. They could just give away as much as they wanted while grocery stores see sales drop. It is about trying to balance supply and demand. I am not saying my answer is absolutely correct but there will be economic factors that would come into play and change the balance of supply and demand when more free goods are introduced into the system. Simple supply and demand curves show that people (demand) goes towards the lower cost items so the lower the price...in this example no cost or free at the food bank would start to change the buying behaviours of consumers. As more consumers go to free items grocery stores would see lower demand (sales). Since they control supply in order to not lose demand they can try to "artificially" keep prices high by reducing the supply available (i.e. less supply left over going to food banks or less free food available). It would be interesting to see a more in depth economic study into how the balance would change and how suppliers would react if they were forced to create more "free" goods available to people. Another thought-- if we want govt intervention because we don't think that the supply and demand curves are not being properly balanced through the open market a better solution may be to break up the oligopolies that control our food supply. If we had a proper open free market then suppliers would enter and exit the market in order to meet the fluctuations in demand. We don't have a proper open free system in Canada. The vast majority of our production and whole sale of food is control by a small few companies-- large companies instead of small farmers now control a lot of our production/ agriculture, a few large companies like Kraft or Coca Cola etc control the vast majority of produced foods, there are only three large companies that own all the slaughter houses for meat production etc. And at the grocery store level there are only three major retailers- Loblaws, Metro and Sobeys- while there are lots of different store names "No Frills" "Food Basics" "Fresh Co" etc they are all banners owned by these major three. Break up the oligopolies that control our enter food system from production to retail sales and create a more open competitive market and the dynamics between supply and demand will change. That would probably do more to help lower prices and everyone then just donating to food banks but again that is just some high level thoughts. It would be interesting to see a more in depth economic study.
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it took a strike by their employees that are being screwed out of a living wage by a billion dollar company that saw double digit increases in profit done on the backs of the Canadian people to essentially force Metro to not throw away food but give it to the food bank is respect?
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