Federal Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said he’d consider it a good thing if Canada’s major grocery chains were upset about his talks with foreign players. “That’s good if they’re concerned,”
I wrote⬇️while reading⬆️:
2024-02-28 – while watching this CBC story, got this info:
in 1970s, canada had 8 large chains grocvery stores. 2024 has 3 majors, 2 minors? so maybe we do need a couple more full national majors, on the scale of loblaws or sobey or empire
wtf? what’s empire??
is there a known number of grocery store chains at or above which will lead to enough competition? if we have 5 “majors” (Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Walmart and Costco), will adding a 6th or 7th do much?
if would be interesting to list the # of “majors” in various other fields (and maybe use a table block????) challenge: how to define “majors”; the list of grocery majors above suggests nation-wide; check if they are indeed nation-wide, Walmart=Y, Metro=N (ON & QC), Loblaw=Y, Sobeys=Y, Costco=Y~)
| Industry | Majors? |
| groceries | 5 |
| gas stations | |
| drug store | |
| cell phone | |
| internet providers | |
| banks |
other interesting things…
i tried ChatGPT, but it can’t do this sort of mapping. trying to get a list from Costco’s website might be dooable if one has the patience. but i did find this from ScrapeHero (others below in the gallery):
chatGPT is handdy for summarizing data from sources, for importing into other apps (in this case I am wanting the populatioopn of each province in order from easst to west, ex territories. a few chats later, data got. and then same for area of each province (since we’re figuring # of each store per population, might as well do it for privince area.
so here’s the spreadsheet, and a snip with Costco filled in:
would be cool to make a map of canada with this data visualized somehow. but must fill in the data above first. but…. why?
CAREFUL!! these are likely just the “Loblaws” branded stores, not the numberous other brands under the Loblaw company (see next) 
