Loblaw Restores Country-Of-Origin Labels After Discovering Canadians Read Them Like Scripture
Loblaw has reversed its decision to drop country-of-origin stickers from produce, which is a polite way of saying several hundred thousand people stood in the vegetable aisle turning over peppers like forensic investigators and then wrote to head office about it.
The original rationale was operational simplicity. Fewer labels, fewer changes, fewer stickers peeled off by shoppers who wanted to know whether their asparagus had crossed a border. The company appears to have underestimated the specific national talent that has developed over the past year, in which a Canadian can identify a Mexican bell pepper at four metres and deliver a short lecture on it.
What makes the backlash funny is that the label is not a boycott instruction. It is a sticker. It says a word. Everything else, the moral arithmetic, the sighing, the quiet decision to buy the slightly worse-looking Ontario cucumber out of principle, happens entirely inside the customer's head, unpaid and unprompted. Loblaw's only job was to not take the sticker away.
Grocery chains have spent years trying to make shoppers feel something. They ran loyalty programmes, they printed leaflets, they put maple leaves on things that grow in Peru. Then they achieved genuine emotional engagement by accident, by threatening to remove a piece of information roughly the size of a thumbnail.
The labels are back. Store insiders describe the lesson as valuable and inexpensive.
The expensive lesson comes later, when everyone checks the price sticker with the same enthusiasm.