> Canada is also a highly multicultural country with 20% born elsewhere and a national grocer must target them to find success, Mr Singh said.
Then why doesn’t Canada have a huge network of ethnic grocery stores tailored to more frugal immigrant communities? I assume it does and the issue is one of consumer education.
They’re all over the US in every state with a decent immigrant population. Mexican, Persian, Armenian, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and so on - that’s just the ones off the top of my head that I shop at monthly.
Chicken is usually cheaper at Costco and milk/eggs/cheese at Trader Joes, but all other meat and produce is significantly cheaper, on the order of 2-3x lower than the price at Costco/TJs. Their produce varies more based on whats in season and what their suppliers have the most of, but they also have crazy deals every week. My favorite this year was rebranded Sumo mandarins that sold for $0.33/lb which everyone else was selling for $2-3/lb (I was eating 3 pounds a day for a month).
> Then why doesn’t Canada have a huge network of ethnic grocery stores tailored to more frugal immigrant communities? I assume it does and the issue is one of consumer education.
Two quick web searches reveal that Canada has about 1/10th the USA population at ~37m people as of 2021. Canada also has roughly 1.6% more landmass than the USA. I don’t think there’s the density to support your theory.
That's 18 million people or half the population living within spitting distance of the US border and that doesn't even include British Columbia. The vast wilderness is largely unpopulated.
And where were these rebranded Sumo's? We only saw Sumo's this year for $4-5/lb nearly everywhere we looked. Were these rebranded things really Sumo's or did they just look like Sumo's.
I did see something that looked like a Sumo call a 'dekopon' citrus at major grocers on the east coast, but they were maybe $1/lb cheaper as best and not as good or large as one with a Sumo sticker. They were more tart and not as an intense flavor.
It's my understanding that the variety has existed for a long time in Japan and Sumo is just one specific branded citrus sub-variety from California.
They were rebranded as Satsumas but had no sticker, in Southern California at an Arabic grocer.
They were just as large, sweet, seedless, and easy to peel as the Sumos with identical appearance. This is the fourth or fifth year in a row that they've had them at a deep discount and I started eating them when Trader Joes first introduced them at $4/piece so there was definitely a delay before they appeared at other stores. Trader Joes tends to get them a few weeks earlier than the other store so I usually compare them every year.
I don't know if they're actually Sumos or not but they're just as sweet and identical in every other way. It might be a pretty obvious cross so once the farm that made and copyrighted the Sumo name, everyone else figured it out too but they can't sell it as Sumos because that's a registered trademark. I.e. these guys, which don't look like any other Satsuma I've ever seen or found online (real satsumas with stickers are in stock right now at one of my stores): https://paradisenursery.com/product/satsuma-mandarin-trees/
I didn't realize that Sumos were from California. The company that grows them could also just be dumping excess inventory in the local market without stickers to maintain their brand.
Sourcing regular fresh food staples to be competitive with the big chains is hard. You have to use the big chains sub companies as a supplier more often than not unless you partner with local farmers. Even small grocers I go to have a 'foodland' section for products they can't get local, or for cheaper versions of the locally farmed items.
Then you are a nuance of a trip if you can't carry the fresh food staples, especially outside a metro area.
We do in the major cities and they are slowly growing but our idiot government is letting the big guys buy them up when they become a serious competitor. The problem, as almost always, is the government not doing its job and breaking up/ not allowing acquisitions by these big guys.
There are tons of small-to-medium sized grocery stores with a strong ethnic focus and a focus on prices. You don't hear about them because they one-offs and not a national chain.
Target tried to enter the Canadian market and lost $5.4 billion. Yes it's not a grocer but the idea is similar: Canada is a hard country for foreign companies to enter. The countries is filled with failed foreign entrances: cellular, grocer, clothing brands.
On the other hand, there are plenty of success stories of foreign chains entering Canada. Target's rival Walmart has been reasonably successful in Canada, having over 400 stores. Target made a lot of mistakes entering the Canadian market, starting with leasing locations of dying Canadian chain Zellers and even still running them as Zellers for years, which didn't help building up the Target brand in Canada.
Target's approach was quite similar to what Walmart did in 1994, when Walmart entered the Canadian market.
Walmart took over around a hundred or so of the long-established Woolco stores, and converted them to Walmart stores. The Woolco stores I'm aware of were then replaced with new larger Walmart-built store in the same area within a few years.
I think Target's main problem was more timing rather than execution. In 1994, Canada still had a relatively strong middle class with money to spend, although that would eventually be harmed thanks to NAFTA, excessive government interference in the economy, and excessive immigration. By 2011 when Target showed up, Canada's middle class was already suffering, and it has only gotten much worse since then.
All of the Target stores I ever visited in Canada were decent. The pricing typically wasn't as competitive as Walmart's was, but the Target stores were generally a nicer experience.
They also messed up with their computer system. I forget the details from the account I read, but it had to do with trying to import the entire system from the US, database included, and spending more time fixing errors than actually selling anything. That database (if I recall right) included the sales data they used to predict demand and allocate stock, and it was completely wrong for the new market.
It might have worked if they started with a few stores to work out the kinks and incorporate the data into their planning systems, but they went for a huge launch instead and couldn't keep shelves stocked because nothing was where it needed to be.
Not just foreigners. A few years ago many Canadian restaurants tried to pivot to being grocery stores, but the customers never came in any meaningful way. Canadians are exceptionally brand loyal.
Cell carriage is, indeed, another great example. Many of the home-grown independent telcos in Canada started operating cell networks in the mid-2000s, but they were never able to win over the customers loyal to Bell and Rogers. The CEO of one of those telcos, which remains a strong player in the wired market in my local area, states that venturing into mobile was his biggest mistake.
> Many of the home-grown independent telcos in Canada started operating cell networks in the mid-2000s, but they were never able to win over the customers loyal to Bell and Rogers.
It has nothing to do with loyalty, the coverage of these networks is just bad. I'm on one right now. Canada is a huge sprawling country and many people venture far for camping, to cottages and so on, and they won't go with a cell provider where they lose service 10 mins outside of Toronto.
It's even worse sometimes, coverage in cities adjacent to Toronto, like Oakville, is also sometimes bad. Canada's problem with mobile is sprawl and a largely ineffective regulator.
> It has nothing to do with loyalty, the coverage of these networks is just bad.
They had nationwide agreements. They still do, technically, but no longer operate any cell sites, now essentially being a Bell reseller. Even as a reseller, their customer base hasn't grown in any meaningful way, certainly not beyond the wired customer audience. In fact, I bet you don't even know their names. Nobody in Canada cares to look beyond their loyalty.
What typically happens is that they are just bought up by one of the big 3. I had a great plan with Fido, very reasonable prices and good service, and because they were growing, Rogers bought them up and then all the prices shot up to match Rogers.
> What typically happens is that they are just bought up by one of the big 3.
Perhaps, but as they are owned by the customer (or government in a few cases), that would ultimately be on the customer to decide. If future service, price, or quality was of concern, they could easily reject the deal.
Agreed. If we (Canada) want to make a serious effort at reducing the inflationary expense of groceries, we should start looking at things like the protection racket surrounding our domestic dairy product industry.
But I don't see that happening because that'll lose votes in areas where the Liberal party is weak.
The farm and farm-adjacent population make up such a small segment of the population these days, even in farming areas, that nobody has to appeal to them. However, the government is legally obligated to buy back the quota, which would be a devastating cost. Ain't no politician (outside of those going to crazy town, like Bernier) would ever touch that even with a ten foot pole.
It was done for tobacco in 2009, but the tobacco industry in Canada was already essentially nothing. The cost to get out was still massive, but only a tiny, tiny fraction of what it would cost to get out of dairy, poultry, and eggs.
I don't know how this misconception persists, but Target's Canada failure was entirely Target's fault. They made huge errors in distribution/inventory and the shelves were empty from grand opening. They resolved their inventory issues after their fate had been sealed.
Canadians are risk averse, too afraid to stand out and too eager to put down America and claim to be better than them for any significant change to happen.
Maybe the worst out of the developed countries across all metrics.
Maybe, but it’s also remarkable Canada hasn’t had a bank failure in >100 years. It’s a safe, peaceful and prosperous developed country. Hard to argue that Canada hasn’t done fairly well. I still agree it’s perhaps too risk averse, but I disagree it’s the worst performing of all developed countries in that regard.
For greater insight into how grocery stores are run in America, I highly recommend the gripping book "The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket" by Benjamin Lorr.
The author gets a job at Whole Foods and then works his way through the food chain, reporting every step of the way, and relating it back to what is seen and experienced at the store. Really excellent reporting IMO.
Blaming 'corporate greed' is a easy thing for politicians to do. It's then not their actions that are causing prices to go up.
Easy to point at things like 'record profits' of Loblaws, without looking at if their margins have changed (they haven't). If you keep the same margins and have the amount of business with inflation then of course there are 'record profits'.
Their margins actually did go up but it’s kinda hilarious when you see it — they’re squeaking out ~3% these days while it was a razor thin 1.x% before.
Yup that’s an extra buck fitty on your $100 of groceries
I found it interesting that in the comparison of the largest grocery stores in the three countries (US, UK, and Canada), UK's Tesco beat out not only Canada's Loblaw, but US' Walmart as well. I know food isn't the only factor in cost of living, but typically the UK is presented as having a much higher COL than either the US or Canada, but not at least in this case.
Well, the butter is a different size (about half of US/CA size). When adjusted for that, it's very nearly the same as US prices.
The other problem with these kinds of comparisons is size of country and if the average cost of a product is a nationwide calculation. Food costs in Labrador; Alaska; Hawai'i; and the Yukon are very different from more populated States and Provinces close to transportation routes. The entire UK is barely the size of the US's North East, and not nearly the size of even Ontario.
I'm surprised the BBC left out the elephant in the room: Supply Management [1].
TL;DR Canada has highly protectionist dairy and poultry sectors that artificially constrict supply of dairy and poultry. You'll periodically read reports of dairy farmers intentionally dumping perfectly good milk [2] because they produced more than their allotted quota.
Even worse, all the federal political parties are too cowardly to stop it; in fact, the House of Commons recently passed [3] a private member's bill that essentially prevents the Minister of Foreign Affairs from negotiating any trade agreement that would weaken the supply management regime. (As you can imagine, Canada often gets called out for its hypocrisy during trade negotiations.) The politicians are scared to anger dairy farmers, particularly the ones in Quebec.
I haven't seen the price of milk or eggs go up all that much but I've seen the price of soda and chips increase by more than 50% in the past few years. I'm fine with our farmers not having to compete with hormone infused milk.
> The politicians are scared to anger dairy farmers, particularly the ones in Quebec.
The Progressive Conservatives were never afraid of angering dairy farmers. They ran on the very platform of ending the supply management in the 90s (granted, it didn't secure them a win, obviously). And, indeed, the PCs who remained in the CPC ranks have shown that they continued to believe in it, sometimes quite vocally. It's interesting that the Reformers are such scaredy cats.
I disagree with the presumption that Canadians are angry with grocery stores, and virtually no one has boycotted Loblaws.
Checking out Loblaws' six-month stock market performance, we see a rise from $122 per share to $161 per share, 30% increase since the botcott started.
The highly unpopular government has significantly raised taxes on truckers and farmers, leading to food inflation. Rather than accepting responsibility, this 4th place political party, which is going to lose in the next election, is scapegoating grocery stores. However, this blame game isn't convincing anyone.
Loblaws' stock price going up implies that their profits are better, which implies that their margins are better, which implies that consumers are paying more for the same goods because goods haven't become cheaper due to inflation across the board, which suggests that your claim that Canadians are NOT angry with them is probably not true. I think the fact that Canadians are upset with Loblaws is pretty well documented at this point.
It does not imply that. In fact, given that restaurant patronage has declined significantly in Canada, if they are more profitable it is likely that they are more profitable on volume.
Unless, perhaps, you think Canadians have traded going to restaurants with fasting?
Fair, although that shows the gross margin has declined. So why would gross margin fall, but net margin rise? I posit that it is likely that they can operate more efficiently when the customers buy more groceries.
But if people had an issue with Loblaw, why would they buy more groceries from them?
> Loblaws' stock price going up implies that their profits are better, which implies that their margins are better,
This is not correct. Government policy of continuously purchasing power of currency dictates nominal profits and stock price should go up even if profit margins do not.
Everyone else is just checking the weekly specials and shopping where the deals are, Loblaws stores included, if they give a shit about grocery prices at all.
> This is perhaps/maybe true amongst the NDP and virtually nobody else.
I have no idea where you're getting your information, but you seem out of touch. The widespread mockery they received for their "generous price freeze" on no name items was virtually unanimous.
>I have no idea where you're getting your information, but you seem out of touch.
You cede your position on the stock details and only respond to a small mostly unrelated sentence.
I collected my information from the Toronto stock exchange.
>The widespread mockery they received for their "generous price freeze" on no name items was virtually unanimous.
This is another thing which I never saw. Not very widespread obviously. Especially given investor sentiment toward loblaws.
So the Liberals taking a ton of heat over causing high inflation, amended the competition act, in september, to temporarily force grocery stores to freeze pricing. https://openparliament.ca/bills/44-1/C-56/
There was no specific against loblaws factor here, but it wasn't loblaws doing this out of the kindness of their heart.
It's interesting how out of touch you seem to be. I've provided sourcing along the way here.
Something very interesting: I live in southern Ontario and when I randomly opened up reddit.com in a private Firefox window the night before last (testing a low ram VM, needed some heavy js site) the top of the homepage was a sticky post from that subreddit. For hours. It didn’t even have that many votes or comments but it was stuck at post #1 somehow
knee jerk conversation has entered the chat
It's disappointing to see people just apply whatever thing they are bother by to every situation. It comes off as pretty narrow minded and political.
I don't think that the Conservative Party will fix this problem. Much like the Liberal Party, the Conservatives are very pro-immigration.
A Conservative government might impose a slight reduction in the rate, to create the appearance of differentiating themselves from the Liberals. I don't think they'd bring it down much beyond that.
I certainly don't see the Conservative Party putting in place the negative immigration rate that's now unfortunately required to deal with the significant economic and social problems Canada is facing. I doubt they'd send home all of the temporary foreign workers, and deport the fake "refugees" who entered from the US, for example.
Even the PPC, which is perhaps the most willing of the broadly mainstream parties to properly deal with this situation, is still calling for an immigration rate of "between 100,000 and 150,000 annually" in its current platform (https://www.thepeoplespartyofcanada.ca/issues/immigration).
I agree that the Conservative Party won't fix what the Liberals did to Canada. I won't be voting Conservative. Never have, never will.
The Conservative Party will do what the Conservative Party in the UK did: bring in MASSIVE AUSTERITY. When people start defaulting on their mortgages en mass the government will step in to buy up all the dodgy loans. In, short the taxpayer will be burdened with this huge debt. The Conservatives will say they have to introduce AUSTERITY to pay down this enormous debt. That means savage cuts to services. Just like in the UK. Ten years of Austerity in the UK has turned in the UK into a third world country. The only thing that will "save" Canada from third world status is that it has lots of natural resources. Provided there is demand for them and that they don't give it away too cheaply.
Since you asked for someone to steelman, I’ll chime in to say this graph looks great to me.
As Canada has grown rich, our fertility rate has gone down. I have no moral problem with that, but it does cause a problem: as the population ages, the ratio of workers (who pay tax) to retired people (who carry a tax burden) shrinks. The options are increasing the taxes on workers, cutting the benefits to the retired, or increasing the working age population via immigration.
As to grocery stores, housing prices, etc. I think these problems are more related to a lack of competition. A free market can handle an influx of consumers.
> The options are increasing the taxes on workers, cutting the benefits to the retired, or increasing the working age population via immigration.
I think the third option could be further broken down:
3a) increase the working age population via a well planned immigration strategy that includes necessary infrastructure spending (medical residencies, housing, etc etc) to support that immigration
3b) open up the floodgates with absolutely no planning for the consequences whatsoever and then blame everyone else for the ensuing inflation and societal stress.
This is what also Merkel's Germany plan was, and the results are... so-and-so. I wonder how come nobody thought about said strategical planning? I know planning is hard but it's not nuclear science and they should have counted with the pushback as well. And by the way, did anybody learn any lesson?
> Since you asked for someone to steelman, I’ll chime in to say this graph looks great to me. As Canada has grown rich, our fertility rate has gone down. I have no moral problem with that, but it does cause a problem: as the population ages, the ratio of workers (who pay tax) to retired people (who carry a tax burden) shrinks.
This is not even close to the only problem. Our housing stock has not kept up with population growth, which is a big reason why housing prices have been so out of control here. It's not due to a lack of competition so much as regulation and population growth that has outpaced building capacity.
So I'm not sure I can agree that that graph looks fine. It's true that we need immigration to balance falling fertility rates, but this needs to be balanced by the available resources so the cost of living doesn't spiral out of control. Labour shortages can often be addressed in others ways, like automation.
Yeah, there are clearly other problems with the Canadian market. Didn’t mean to imply there weren’t!
Housing stock I really do think is down to regulation - it’s crazy hard to build here in Vancouver, even right near mass transit stations.
Should we have increased the ability to compete in housing and groceries before the influx of immigrants? Maybe. But I don’t think having them here makes these issues harder to address, and it might increase the pressure to actually take action. Every party is talking about cost of living now.
Regulation cannot be completely discounted, but the bigger issue is labour. If you can even find someone willing to build you a home, they won't even entertain doing it until years into the future. There is no capacity to build more homes.
At least not without paying construction workers a whole lot more in order to compel the software developers away from developing software and into building houses, but then that only drives the cost of housing even higher!
More labour is one way, but there are also orthogonal ways of retargeting the existing building capacity more effectively. For instance, financial discincentives against building low-density luxury housing and more incentives towards building higher density housing would alleviate demand pressure over the span of a few years. We also used to know how to build affordable housing.
Why is that disincentive not already present? Multiple people building a town home should be able to outbid one person building a single family home every single time, and the sky is the limit for a large condo building. Their combined capacity to pay more than outstrips the additional cost to build the structure. It is clear what is a better deal for the construction crew.
I expect the answer is because nobody actually wants to live in such dwellings. They might accept rent in a place like that if they see it as a stop-gap until they can move into their "dream home", but it is not the home they are willing to commit to and build (obviously there are exceptions).
Zoning regulations limits what you can construct in any given location, so it's not even about who has more financial capital, but political capital in many cases.
Not so much an issue anymore, though. Want to build a tiny house? No problem. Multiple houses on a single lot? Go for it! These would have been unthinkable 10-20 years ago, but have been given the green light in more recent times. Council knows that they can't get away with ignoring housing any longer. Of course, it's easy to accept because they also know almost nobody is going to do it.
The only long term option is to increase productivity with education and technology because you can't increase population (however you do it) forever. We should also stop emphasising the total GDP (which can be and is boosted by adding more people) and focus on the GDP per capita instead (which seems to be falling in Canada according to the various graphs posted here).
The claim that immigration is the only option is a fallacy peddled because it's the lazy short term option and "Après moi, le déluge" [1]
Yeah, I should have mentioned productivity growth - it is of course another solution to the problem. I think it’s harder for governments to implement policy that increases productivity growth than immigration, though.
I would be interested to have the person you replied to steelman why, specifically, they believe that the contents of that graph would lead to social decline and political turmoil.
Since that graph measures per capita, I think the obvious (and grim) one might come to here is that immigrants to Canada, on average, aren't as productive in the Canadian economy as native citizens.
No doubt you hit the nail on the head, for two reasons:
1. Immigration is a federal matter, commerce is (mostly) a provincial matter. In practice, this means the federal government brings in the people it thinks should be most economically useful for the economic need that is present, but the provinces put up red tape to disallow them from being most useful. The canonical example here being the trained medical doctor left to drive a taxi.
2. Immigrants tend to want to settle amongst each other. Which is no doubt important socially, but the communities are most often not located where there is the economic need. This leaves individuals to be under-utilized, if even jobless, all while employers can't find anyone to hire. Since provincially-regulated employers can't find anyone to hire, the federal government sees a need for even more people and use one of the few tools they have. You can guess what happens next.
Is this true for well educated immigrants too? It seems like this might be affecting a limited population, if the educated immigrant goes to Canada, they are aware of what immigration means and might be open integrating instead of living in an immigrants community
Well, if we look at the Statscan economic region that consistently posts the lowest unemployment rate (and where the news regularly reports on the exceptionally high number of job vacancies), only 2,140 immigrants arrived there from 2016-2021 (latest census data). Whereas 1,328,240 immigrants arrived in Canada over the same period.
Is it possible that only 0.16% of immigrants are educated? Well, maybe, but if that's the case it is insignificant enough that it is basically meaningless. Said economic region is home to 0.8% of the population, so immigrants are disproportionately not going there despite the data showing the greater economic need.
Education does not remove the human experience. I expect it is plain hard to be one of almost no immigrants to show up somewhere, even if you come with awareness. You aren't likely to find a familiar culture, or other people going through the same experience, so it can easily become isolating. Immigrant communities beget immigrants because they offer something to immigrants. Life isn't just about work it turns out.
Y’all make fun of us for everything from our lousy patchwork health care system to sucking at hockey. Seems only fair to send a little flack back across what’s left of the border.
The root cause might be stagnant productivity. Faced with this, politicians can boost GDP by increasing the population. The root cause would therefore be using GDP growth as the success metric, stagnation in the said metric and an inability to facilitate its growth with anything other than increasing the amount of people in the economy.
Some variation of that in nearly every "Western" country. East Asian countries have similiar challenges with low birth rates, but aren't targeted for demographic replacement for totally mysterious reasons
That projected 39 million for 2024, but we're already over 41 million right now [1]. So if the graph that started this thread is correct, in 2023 the Canadian population grew 3% just from immigration.
There's no question we need immigration given the low fertility rate, but there is definitely a limit to how much immigration is stable vs. disruptive, eg. if you doubled your population in one year the country would be unrecognizable and there wouldn't be enough resources to meet everyone's needs. For instance, housing capacity has been growing a lot slower than 3% per year for decades now, which is definitely a factor in our very high housing costs. We're definitely in a pickle.
Citation that a "significant fraction" of those who immigrated were facing certain death?
Also, implicit in your post seems to be an assertion that the moral responsibility for their deaths would fall on us rather than the people causing the deadly circumstances in their home countries, and that we are thus we are obligated to help in this specific way. There are a lot of problems with this argument.
The post you replied to showed a graph of almost 1.2 million migrants in 2023 alone, a roughly 5x jump from historical norms of 10+ years ago. You then said "a significant fraction of those people" would be dead otherwise, but now you're saying we've admitted 1 million refugees since 1980. 1 million since 1980 seems totally reasonable but I just can't square up that number with what you said in response to the original graph.
I understand what you're saying, but I think that descriptor is very misleading in this context. The original post was discussing a very large uptick in absolute numbers and the subsequent increased demand on resources that would entail. Your response about a very small subset of those numbers just isn't very relevant if you're only talking about 5% of that increase.
I know you struggle with context given our other threads, so I'll connect the dots: the "problem" from the original post was a large increase in immigration placing a strain on resources. If someone replies that a "significant fraction" of those immigrants were facing certain death, AND this "significant fraction" accounts for only 5% of the increase the original post was talking about, then that reply is at best a complete red herring; that 5% subset is simply not the source of the "problems" alluded to in the original post, eg. if you kept immigration levels at historic norms and only allowed additional refugees, you wouldn't have the "problems" the original post was alluding to.
That reply is only relevant to the original post if "significant fraction" consists of a meaningfully large percentage of that increase that is allegedly causing the problems.
Therefore, the phrasing of that reply in-context is misleading at best.
And, to continue with your fallacy for the sake of humour, I know you struggle with logic given our other threads, so I'll help you out here in a now non-humorous way: There is nothing to suggest the comment was of relevance. You are searching for something that never was.
Seems that way. Someone even asked for a "citation" in another comment, meaning that they wanted to know from where a comment was originally copied. Think about that one for a minute. You have to wonder sometimes.
I suppose asking for a citation could be considered deliberately obtuse. What is even the point of talking to someone else by proxy? If you really have an interest in what someone else had to say, why not go talk to them directly? If you want to have a discussion with the actors in front of you, why not talk to them instead?
Oh, right, you're not interested. But then why be here at all?
Then why doesn’t Canada have a huge network of ethnic grocery stores tailored to more frugal immigrant communities? I assume it does and the issue is one of consumer education.
They’re all over the US in every state with a decent immigrant population. Mexican, Persian, Armenian, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and so on - that’s just the ones off the top of my head that I shop at monthly.
Chicken is usually cheaper at Costco and milk/eggs/cheese at Trader Joes, but all other meat and produce is significantly cheaper, on the order of 2-3x lower than the price at Costco/TJs. Their produce varies more based on whats in season and what their suppliers have the most of, but they also have crazy deals every week. My favorite this year was rebranded Sumo mandarins that sold for $0.33/lb which everyone else was selling for $2-3/lb (I was eating 3 pounds a day for a month).