One fine Saturday morning last summer, I was looking through the thick stack of flyers in the newspaper, hoping to find a good deal on my favorite cereal, Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I looked in the thin yellow No Frills flyer, the green themed Sobey’s flyer, and the Loblaws one too. All of these stores are walking distance from my home and it would take a maximum of 15 minutes to have that cereal box in my hand! Not that I was so desperate to buy cereal, but you get my point.
The next day I took a stroll down to Loblaws for my mission and to my surprise, a Longos sign was being put up right across the street from it! So was a sign for Rexall pharmacy. It truly did not make sense to me at first. There were literally 3 grocery stores already in our vicinity, not to mention 2 large Shoppers Drug Marts. So what was up corporate gods? It seemed like they forgot to take a quick look around our neighborhood before bringing in new chains. Sure, some of these corporations may be competing, but would they not be more profitable elsewhere?
So, a few months later I went to the grand opening of this Longos and it was like a carnival in there! They had free samples of fruits, bakery items, an open salad bar, chefs giving out pizza samples, a Starbucks, you name it and it was there. Their produce turnover was also very fast so all the produce was in pristine condition while you could get the actual ripe bananas at a reduced price. Score! I started going there with my mother more often. Yes, mostly for their exquisite bakery foods but try to understand, I just cannot deprive my sweet tooth.
Eventually, the competition phase between Loblaws, Sobeys, No Frills, and Longos dwindled down. Many people in my neighborhood were seen back in their natural habitat (whichever supermarket or drugstore they were familiar with initially), and the new guy, Longos put a hold on their free goodies and bought their prices up to their normal range. No one really profited too much. At least not in terms of health. So as health practitioners in training what are these GIS (Geographic Information Systems) we learnt about? Were they used? I recall that governmental and non-governmental organizations use such systems to determine the locations in need of resources, particularly those related to health. Was my town overlooked (or underlooked for that matter)? Or is the answer to this curious case is that corporate culture and business competition is more important than the determinants of health. With the vast number of health inequities existing in our country, is it possible to ignore the determinants of health and give in the corporate fights?
I have seen neighborhoods which are bound to only one supermarket and have to share among an excessively overflowing population. In a recent seminar, one of my peers was telling us that you would see people in her neighborhood bring groceries on the TTC because supermarkets were plainly inaccessible. This made me think. What if I was not fortunate enough to live in a community like mine. I might rather go to my local Tim Hortons and get a coffee and a donut rather than get pushed and shoved on the subway just to get a new carton of milk or fruit for snack! Communities need to be carefully planned out with prioritizing the needs of the residents, not the corporations.
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