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| Montrealer Laurette Sloan urges shoppers to boycott groceries in Oct. 1966 |
"Four dollars please."
Four bucks!...are you freakin kidding me brah?!
Modern price sticker shockers like this were once so common that for generations cash register outrage sparked shopping boycotts and protests in Montreal.
The first Montreal grocery boycott against high food prices appears to be the potato boycott of 1916 when the Montreal Housewives League - which lasted until at least 1951 - had shoppers snubbing the spuds just before Christmas that year during WWI.*
The same housewives organization urged consumers to "fight the profiteers" in 1939 at the onset of the next big war and the thrifty women continued butting heads against dairy farmers - who irked them by fighting the advent of margarine - and sent a delegation to the provincial capital, led by Gertrude Partridge, to demand a price cut on milk products in 1946.**
But the wallet-closing perfect storm initiative against high food prices in Montreal was supposedly sparked in 1966 when a Toronto shopper claimed that a store was charging $1.20 for a single turnip, about $9.21 in today's money.
Quebec's League of Women, who boasted 100,000 members, joined in on the boycott of larger chains in October 1966, while Inflation Fighters, led by Ursula Krueger of 5331 Henri Bourassa east were on board.
Krueger was no softie, accusing the smaller stores of hiking prices once they realized that they had a new captive market."Grocery store owners were behind the boycott but once they got the women buying from them at the promised 10 percent cut, they started raising their prices again," she said.
About 75 women assembled in Verdun to plan their boycott strategy at a meeting which saw federal cabinet minister Bryce Mackasey applaud the frugal women and their actions, which would last about three weeks that ended in early November 1966 without any clear result.
Montreal housewives even vowed to launch their own coop grocery stores to keep prices down. Norma Meyers launched a group called Angry Consumers that picketed Montreal supermarkets.
"Food boycotts and picketing while useful in attracting publicity are only temporary inducements to chain stores to lower prices. We must find a more permanent solution. We are forming a committee of businessmen, bankers, architects and other qualified people to advise us how and where to set up co ops," a representative said.
"Food boycotts and picketing while useful in attracting publicity are only temporary inducements to chain stores to lower prices. We must find a more permanent solution. We are forming a committee of businessmen, bankers, architects and other qualified people to advise us how and where to set up co ops," a representative said.
Boycotts were few after that, although a Toronto group called WARP - Women Against Rising Prices, inspired the inception of a Montreal group known as the Mouvement Quebecois pour le boycottage des prodiuts alimentaire.
That group took aim at a new list of products every week in an effort to bring those prices down, so for example on 7 April, 1979 they asked shoppers to boycott "all meat that costs $1.75 or more, sugar cereal, canned fish, grapes costing more than $1.25 per pound. " and so on.
The legacy of all of this is a theme which resonates throughout Coolopolis - systems have improved with time and our lives our better than in the past. Over the years the portion of a family's budget devoted to food shopping has been radically diminished as food production and delivery has been streamlined to the point that our lives have all benefitted.
So Montrealers, feel joy when you slide that bank card over the cash reader as the cause of your grocery price stress no longer measures up against the misery of the past.
* Mtl Gazette pg. 3 Dec. 4 1916
*Ibid Oct. 7, 1946 p. 7