Call it invisible cheating. But it’s cheating, nevertheless! A CBC investigation has confirmed a private sector probe that found Canadians have been overcharged consistently for meat by some super-markets for who-knows-how-long!
Iris Griffin blew the whistle on Loblaws…
It sounds like a trivial thing. But it all adds up over millions of transactions spanning many years. Millions of Canadians have been paying a ‘premium’ for store-packaged meats which were weighed out for pricing including the weight of their plastic trays.
Not the first time
I remember a scandal a few years ago. This was before the public was much aware of the workings of the banking system and before computers and their implications were fully appreciated at the con-sumer level…
It turned out that a computer wiz at a big US bank had re-programmed the way its computers hand-led computations that resulted in fractions of a cent. Instead of rounding up or down, our techno-crook told he computers to deposit the tiny difference in an account of his own. The result was an instant fortune for the perp. And he didn’t have to life a finger.
But the books didn’t quite balance as a result. And the auditors quickly traced the deficit back to its source.
Magnitude unknown
The full magnitude of the meat weighing ‘scandal’ remains unknown. And may never be fully account-ed for. No one knows how long the practice including packaging weight in meat sales weights has been going on. No knows how different types of plastic trays used over the years, with different den-sities, have influenced the situation.
But the CBC investigation does estimate that shoppers at at least 80 Loblaw’s stores were overcharg-ed between 4 and 11 percent depending on such factors over an undisclosed period that ended in December 2023.
The whistle-blower
Manitoba shopper Iris Griffin told CBC News she first noticed a discrepancy when she was dividing a ‘club pack’ of ground beef into meal-sized portions for freezing. The weight on the package label was higher than the actual weight of the contents by 134 g.
“I was angry,” said Griffin, who calculated she’d been overcharged $1.27 (7.9 per cent) on the $17.35 price tag. “I’m being charged for this piece of plastic at the price of the ground beef.”
Under federal regulations, posted net weights for packaged food — and prices based on that weight — can’t include the packaging. CBC notes.
She complained to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), which alerted Loblaw’s… And de-manded an explanation.
What Loblaw’s said…
Loblaw’s spokesperson Catherine Thomas said that, due to an error involving a change in packaging, the grocer sold ‘a small number of under-weight meat products in 80 stores across Western Canada CBC reported.
“We have robust internal processes and controls in place; however, they are subject to the occasional operational error,” Thomas said. “Even though 97 per cent of our [2,400] stores were unaffected, any pricing issue that results in an overcharge is one too many.”
Since Loblaw’s voluntarily – and immediately – investigated the situation and corrected the problem, CFIA brought no fraud charges, nor levied any fines against the company.
“That’s going to add up into a very large number, potentially into millions and millions of dollars,” lawyer and consumer advocate Daniel Tsai observed. “There’s definitely a need here for some kind of rectification that consumers get compensated.”
Loblaw’s has said it will compensate shoppers who were overcharged. But details of the compensation plan were not revealed immediately.
My take
I, for one, would like to know more about those ‘occas-ional operational errors Thomas cited. And why did the errors take place only at Western Canada stores?
Were certain meat department staff unaware of the regulations? Inadequately trained in the procedures for weighing up store-packaged products?
Or did someone somewhere in the Loblaw’s chain of command – most likely at the Western Canada regional level – decide to make the company a little more pro-fit by informally changing the rules? We’ll probably never get answers for any of those questions.
But I can tell you that controversies about diddling with the scales when weighing up food products go back much, much farther than this incident. And will probably continue to pop up well into the future…
~ Maggie J.