Gaurds in the Grocery

Foreword

Hi friends! Reed here. It has been awhile since I wrote. I have had a remarkable year - tough in ways that have challenged me beyond my capabilities.

I have been going through a time of recovery. It has been tough. Lots of soul searching and talk therapy. Time down (I am unemployed 💅) has been a blessing and a curse.

I am hoping to get back to being a public figure soon. I have also been sharpening my axe. Let it be known; I've things to say.

Guards in the Grocery

Every grocery store I go into has at least one guard. A visible security force; often more than one. Probably a plain clothes secret shopper watching me too. They rarely follow me (privilege) and sometimes they'll even give me "the nod" (uber privilege).

Cameras everywhere. Try counting them next time you go to any corporate store - dozens and dozens of them. The checkout counter is scanning our faces for sure. Tracking all your movements.

Then there is the new e-ink displays for pricing. Our groceries becoming a commodity in live time. So precious it needs guards, cameras, and in some stores, actual armed police forces.

I can think of no better indicator of late stage capitalism in our local economy. On the precipice of fascism. A basic human need hoarded right before our eyes.

There have never been more food insecure people in Edmonton than right now. In Alberta, almost 1 in 3 households experience food insecurity. Nationally, 25.5% of Canadians, roughly 10 million people, including 2.5 million children, now live in food-insecure households, the highest level ever recorded. Edmonton's Food Bank is serving the highest number of people in its 43-year history — over 43,000 individuals every month and 500,000 meals and snacks through 380+ partner agencies. Never been more children missing meals. Never more people going hungry.

All while corporate profits have never been higher. Loblaw posted $656 million in profit in Q4 2025 alone, up from $462 million the year before. Their retail operating income jumped 43%. A Dalhousie University study found that all three major Canadian grocers reported profits above their five-year averages during the worst of the inflation crisis, Loblaw alone outperformed its best year by $180 million.

Our council's solution? Asking to put corporate grocery stores in sites where there was once corporate grocery stores. That's how broken our system is, how lacking our leaders are in imagination - they can offer no solution other than what already exists. Edmonton council voted 12-1 to ask the mayor to lobby the province to ban restrictive covenants, the clauses that let companies like Sobeys block competitors from opening on land they've abandoned. In Griesbach, residents have been waiting 13 years for a grocery store because Sobeys put property controls on the site after buying Canada Safeway and then selling the land. Our politics are so adrift that we are asking to not have outright food deserts - not even affordable food.

Here's the thing about all those guards though. They don't stock shelves. They don't grow food. They don't drive trucks or run cash registers. They produce nothing. Their wages get baked into the price of your groceries — which makes food more expensive, which makes more people desperate, which means you need more guards.

It's a feedback loop. Security eats the thing it's protecting.

Scale that up and you're looking at what every fascist project eventually runs into. You need watchers. Then you need watchers watching the watchers. Then you need someone watching them. Pretty soon half the economy is employed making sure the other half doesn't take what they need to survive. Nobody is left to actually do the work.

The East Germans figured this out the hard way. By the end, one in sixty-three citizens was a Stasi informant. The whole country was a grocery store with more guards than cashiers.

That's the trajectory we're on. Not with secret police, with cameras and e-ink price tags and loss prevention officers and facial recognition at self-checkout. It's softer. It's corporate. But the math is the same. You cannot guard your way to a fed population. You cannot secure a system that is failing to meet basic human needs and expect it to hold.

The guards in the grocery store aren't protecting the food. They're protecting the margin.

And here's what really burns. Toronto City Council just approved a pilot project for four city-run, not-for-profit grocery stores, one in each community council district. Councillor Anthony Perruzza brought the motion as food bank usage in Toronto hit record levels, over 4.1 million visits in the past year, a 340% increase since 2019. Mayor Olivia Chow expanded the motion to also explore policy levers to prevent price gouging by grocery retailers. That happened on March 26, 2026. Two days ago.

New York City — the beating heart of American capitalism, Wall Street's backyard elected a democratic socialist mayor who's putting $70 million toward city-run grocery stores in every borough. His administration has already begun scouting sites, prioritizing food deserts. Not asking Loblaws nicely. Building them.

Atlanta opened a municipal grocery store downtown last year, public money, local suppliers, affordable food in a neighbourhood the chains abandoned. It's serving 600 customers a day and already has a second location in development. Boston is exploring the same model. Even Baltimore did it.

These are American cities. Cities that worship the free market more than we do. And they looked at the grocery problem and said: the market failed, so we'll do it ourselves. Toronto, Canada's largest city just followed suit.

Meanwhile, in Edmonton, supposedly progressive Edmonton, "leftist" Edmonton, the city that pats itself on the back for its social conscience, our council's grand vision for food access is to ask the same corporations that created the crisis to please come back and do it again. To beg Loblaw and Sobeys to grace our neighbourhoods with another store where they can price gouge us under camera surveillance with a security guard at the door.

That's not policy. That's surrender. That's handing the keys to the people who locked the pantry in the first place and hoping they'll be nicer about it this time.

New York is doing socialism. Atlanta is doing socialism. Toronto is doing socialism. Edmonton can't even do imagination.