At grocery stores, things are different, very different
The panic buying has ended. Toilet paper is restocked, and at some stores, on sale. There are no scenes of empty produce aisles or home cooks wondering what to do with the obscure pasta shapes because the spaghetti is gone. But there's still a heaviness in the air at every supermarket, I went to this past week, although perhaps it was because I was breathing through a face mask.
My original goal was to see whether prices of grocery staples have gone up, so I went to five different major supermarkets across the GTA to note the prices of 15 items such as chicken breasts, ground beef, yogurt, bread, pasta, toilet paper and disinfectant wipes.
The Star sent the prices back to an expert for analysis.
Some shoppers waited until I left the aisle to get cans of tomato paste. I caught myself side-eyeing customers who weren't wearing a mask and touching products they didn't buy. In a press conference on Wednesday, Mayor John Tory said that measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 are likely to go on for the next three months. Until then, I'm adjusting to this new norm of grocery shopping.
On a sunny Wednesday afternoon at the Markham location of Whole Foods, I and five other customers stood behind spray-painted yellow lines marked about two metres apart along the sidewalk outside the store, a much more casual setup than that found at Costco two weeks before.
When one customer left, another was allowed in - like outside a nightclub, albeit one that had a host of signs reminding customers to practice social distancing. These were next to a chalkboard advertising a sale on cheese. A woman got antsy and yelled to get the attention of the gatekeeper, asking to be let in after a man left the store with a cart full of bags.
There was also a line to get into the Food Basics at the Shops on Steeles plaza at the edge of Markham and Toronto. But, for a city where diners are used to lining up hours to eat at the Cheesecake Factory, the five-minute wait was nothing.
Limiting the number of shoppers in the stores made it easier to navigate the aisles, but I was still paranoid when a person passed me, as I wondered if they (or I) carried the virus without knowing.
A sign saying that the prices were on lockdown provided a brief moment of levity as I looked for the price of milk.
The Star sent the prices of the items it chose in the supermarkets to Sylvain Charlebois, a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.
"I did not see any evidence of gouging at this point," he told the Star.
Dalhousie released an updated report last week saying that, despite COVID-19, food prices aren't expected to deviate from the average four-per-cent rise predicted last year.
"If there is price-gouging going on, it would be done by individual grocers, instead of happening industry-wide," says Charlebois. "Let's face it, the best police for price gouging is social media."
Last week, Pusateri's released an apology after a photo of the upscale grocer selling $30 container of disinfectant wipes went viral and promoted Premier Doug Ford to crack down on price-gouging.
What will change, Charlebois says, is the number of sales and specials at supermarkets.
"You go into a store and typically you would have a weekly flyer and you would have a series of discounted products. That weekly flyer is becoming thinner and thinner," he says. "Promotions take time. They're complicated. You need vertical coordination between yourself and the suppliers."
At Metro, the store speaker system wasn't advertising sales that day. Instead, it reminded shoppers that the grocer is doing its best during this time and to be kind to the employees.
It's not just flyers and sales being affected; the entire food system has been thrown for a loop. Even though producers stress there is no shortage of food, at Metro, I'm limited to purchasing two meat products and two kinds of pasta. At Whole Foods, I could only buy one unit of toilet paper. My local No Frills had a sign indicating I could only buy two kinds of flour.
Funnily enough, there were no limits on baking products (or anything) at Tone Tai, my local Chinese supermarket at the Peanut Plaza in North York. There were bags of flour stacked high from the floor and jars of yeast on shelves. Despite bread-making being the most popular hobby of self-isolating folks, baking is not a popular activity in Chinese households in my experience.
The reason for the limit isn't a shortage, as supermarkets and producers stressed in the last weeks there's enough food (and toilet paper). Even after the initial wave of panic buying, consumers are simply buying enough food to last them for a week, rather than two or three days, in order to limit the number of times they leave the house and food suppliers are scrambling to redirect the food originally meant for restaurants to the retail market. People are simply using more toilet paper because they're staying at home.
Going to the supermarket is a special occasion nowadays.
Unemployment levels have surged in the last month, making the act of buying food out of reach for some.
Paul Taylor, executive director at FoodShare, a non-profit that addresses food insecurity in the city, said the organization has been raising money to distribute emergency food boxes to those in need, be it those now without an income or service workers who are working on the front lines but are earning a fraction of the nation's average income.
"We're delivering 1,400 free Good Food Boxes filled with produce to folks across the city each week, plus an additional 1,400 in sales of our Good Food Box," he says. "We've gone from about 200 orders a week, to altogether about 3,000 orders this week."
-With files from Jenna Moon
Karon Liu is a Toronto-based culture reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @karonliu