I must admit I am surprised. Canada’s biggest grocery chain has backed down on its’ decision to lower its discount on expiring food. I had thought they would ride out the bad publicity.

The company announced the decision Friday, though it won’t take effect immediately. I guess they want to use up the new stickers that offer a 30 per cent discount instead of the 50 per cent ones they used until last week.

This is a victory for the consumer at a time when there seem to be very few of those. Food prices continue to rise and food insecurity has become and issue in Canada like never before. Food banks are reporting record numbers.

For Loblaws to make the change seemed to me to be rather tone deaf. Whoever made the change probably figured consumers would grumble and adjust. The backlash though must have been greater than expected, to the point where a parliamentary inquiry was being bandied about as a possibility. Being summoned to appear before a committee of the House of Commons is usually bad news for any company’s image.

Canadians are not known for causing a fuss. Perhaps that has allowed corporations to take advantage of consumers over the years. They knew that they could weather public indignation at their actions because it wouldn’t be terribly loud and was guaranteed to be short-lived.

Maybe that is changing. Coming out of the pandemic maybe there has been a social shift in attitudes. Having been misled by government, sometimes deliberately, perhaps there is less of a tendency to just accept what authority figures are saying.

The company said it made the change from 50 to 30 per cent to be “predictable and consistent.” As someone who shops at Loblaws several times a week, I had never found anything unpredictable or inconsistent about the 50 per cent discount. I guess I wasn’t the only one.

Many companies have been quietly shrinking package sizes the past few years without shrinking prices, hoping that this “shrinkflation” will go unnoticed by consumers. It doesn’t usually work, but people have generally accepted the smaller sizes as being preferable to a price hike.

With this move though, maybe the consumer has reached his or her breaking point. It is definitely time.