Open Letter from Foodstuffs North Island Grocers
Dear Prime Minister and Minister Willis,
National is proposing to break up our Foodstuffs co-op, while telling us it won’t impact our businesses, and promising customers that it will make groceries cheaper. That doesn’t add up.
We’re 320+ local families who own and run our own supermarkets. We live in the same towns and neighbourhoods as our customers. One family, one store. Together, we own the Foodstuffs co-op – the engine room that gets groceries on our shelves and helps us compete hard with each other and many other competitors for every customer dollar.
The co-op isn’t some separate corporate head office. It’s our heart, our lifeblood, our backbone.
Local grocers formed this co-op in 1922, so they could buy together to keep prices down. Our co-op still does that, giving us the scale we need, the buying power with big international suppliers, the ability to support and grow new suppliers, the warehouses, the trucks, the IT systems, marketing and the people that help us get groceries onto shelves and deliver value.
You can’t say you’re backing local grocers while taking out the engine that drives our stores. The co-op is how we serve our customers and communities. Along the way, it’s helped thousands of young people get their first job, build careers and trained all of us to run our own stores.
Customers should rightly ask how duplicating all our warehousing and support costs will lower prices. It simply won’t.
The analysis behind your own proposal says regional prices could rise. That’s hard to square with claims this will benefit customers. More than 119 of us serve towns and communities with fewer than 5,000 people. The Foodstuffs co-op model helps ensure smaller communities, like Ōtaki, Tūrangi, Wairoa, Kaikohe and Taumarunui, aren’t left paying more because they’re further from a distribution centre.
We hear you talk about Foodstuffs like it’s a simple corporate structure. That’s wrong.
We are the co-op – small and medium business owners who take on debt and risks to build good local businesses. The value of our biggest asset, our store, is completely tied to the value of the co-op.
We all want groceries to be more affordable. The way to do that is to have strong local
operators, competing hard against the international corporates.
This proposal puts our proudly locally-owned business model at risk. No matter how you spin it, this is about as far from a ‘business friendly’ policy as the National Party could get.
You say the stakes are very high and we agree. We are gutted because, as grocers, we know your policy won’t work – all the risk in this forced break-up sits with us, our customers and communities. We’re now lying awake at night wondering if we can afford to invest in our stores and our co-op’s infrastructure while this uncertainty hangs over us.
If you are serious about keeping prices down at the checkout, you should be backing Kiwi owned businesses and the Foodstuffs co-op we built together, not pulling it apart.
PAK’nSAVE owner operators
New World owner operators
Four Square owner operators
Gilmours owner operators
North Island/Te Ika-a-Māui
A letter from South Island grocers can be read here
I built a building, in a small South Island community, that houses a Freshchoice, so a locally owned business. I fully support the sentiments expressed here because smaller rural communities will get no benefit from these ill-considered policies. They will have no impact on the Ranfurly's, Palmerston's, Roxburgh's or Hawea's. I am utterly shocked by the stupidly of the National Party, we expect such rubbish from the Greens and Labour. The issue is an Auckland/Wellington construct, and they are stuck in an echo chamber of self-pitying political and unionist activism and equally desperate and self-interested political hacks who want power and their job security ensured. It is deeply saddening that to achieve these policy settings property rights and individual rights…
Ardern Hipkins and co added about 7 billion of extra costs on our dairy industry over 10 years.
They did the same with eggs - about 2.2 billion over 10 years.
Add in the costs of energy, as energy = cost of living then the number is astronomical. Let’s get all energy, oil and gas (there Is plenty) ask NZF - keep the thieving IWI from greenmailing our energy infrastructures, give up the net zero rubbish and watch the cost of groceries plummet. singling out what is a very cost effective supply system (for a small population) is not the answer..
While food prices are of concern, a government being able divide and re structure a private enterprise is totally wrong if they are legally going about their business.
Let’s attack the dairy, meat, vegetable and fruit private enterprises.
The message this sends to financiers is very damaging.
Luxon and Willis are totally out of their depth and need to be dumped asap.
Is the cost if living too expensive or are the salaries and wages of productive working people AFTER GOVERNMENT "EXTORTION" increasingly inadequate? I am probably wasting my time trying to explain the current 'game" to people who do not want to understand and stop playing and losing in it but here goes anyway. SUMMARY. Productive working people need to wake up and think about what they receive for their efforts and expenditure of their time, labour and lives.
Then they might understand that what they receive steals the value Of what they sell to earn it.
Then they might demand something real that retains the value of the part of their lives that produce valued goods and services for others to make their…