It was September and he was at the annual general meeting of Empire Co. Ltd., the second-largest grocery chain in Canada and owner of Sobeys, Safeway, IGA, Foodland and FreshCo, among others. Medline, the chief executive, took the stage and was soon on a tangent about “armchair quarterbacks.”
He was fed up with them, the progressive think-tanks, journalists and politicians who were wondering aloud about record profits at grocery chains, and whether that meant they were taking advantage of the worst inflation crisis since the 1980s. Those critics, Medline said, didn’t understand the business enough to see that big grocers were fattening margins and rewarding shareholders despite runaway food inflation, not because of it.
“Michael Medline … is pissed that people are raising questions about how much profit the grocery giants are making,” NDP member of Parliament Charlie Angus wrote on Twitter. “He made $8.6 million last year as CEO of Sobeys. Suck it up, dude.”
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