Militarized surveillance systems are becoming the new normal in many Canadian grocery stores, marking a disturbing symptom of an already fraught food retail system.
At a FreshCo in Toronto and a Superstore in Calgary, staff have begun wearing body cameras in response to rising theft at self-checkouts, organized retail crime where high-value items such as meat are stolen and resold and increased food insecurity.
Surveillance systems in commercial retail are nothing new; cameras, mirrors and store design have long been used to deter shoplifting. But these newer, more militarized approaches seem both heavy-handed and misguided.
The new measures raise important questions about the camera’s effectiveness in theft detection, impacts on consumers and employees and freedom of information and privacy concerns.
Surveillance expands as theft rises
Despite the growing costs for employees and consumers, retailers say they are facing significant losses from retail crime, which the Retail Council of Canada has called a “national crisis.”
Retailers reported an average profit shrink of 1.5 per cent in 2024, which is almost double what it was in 2019. Grocers and retailers have both cited self-checkouts as a top contributor to this shrink.
Meanwhile, police-reported incidents of shoplifting are rising. Toronto police reported that 105 incidents of shoplifting goods over $5,000 occurred in 2024, up from just 32 in 2020. Winnipeg police reported a 46 per cent increase in retail theft in 2024 compared to the year prior.
In response, retailers are spending millions on police, security and other forms of surveillance. Superstore, for example, has spent more than $12 million in the last five years on special duty police officers to patrol checkouts. Walmart started using special duty officers in their Winnipeg stores in 2022, costing the U.S. conglomerate $1.4 million.
Persistent food insecurity
These developments cannot be separated from the fact that food insecurity in Canada is widespread and growing. About one-quarter of all Canadians find themselves food insecure, with disproportionately higher rates among Indigenous, Black, disabled, newcomer and senior populations.
This persists despite Canada having the ninth-largest global economy and despite the global food system producing more food now than at any time in history.
The problem is not a lack of food but a lack of affordable, equitable access to food. Food insecurity has been growing for decades, even as corporate food retailers report high profits.
At the same time, workers’ wages in the retail food sector remain stagnant. The industry relies heavily on migrant and immigrant labourers and routinely pays minimum wage. While the federal minimum wage was just raised to $18.15 per hour, it remains lower in some provinces, including $15 in Alberta.
For many workers, an hour’s wages barely covers the cost of a 10-ounce steak or its vegan equivalent. According to the Canada Food Price Report, Canadians are spending between three and five per cent more on groceries, with the highest increases seen in meat.
As fuel costs increase due to the U.S.-led invasion of Iran, grocery prices are likely to increase even more.
Rising profits for companies
Commercial food retail in Canada, and elsewhere around the world, is big business.
A handful of companies dominate the market. Loblaw Companies Ltd., whose parent company is led by CEO Galen Weston Jr., operates chains including Loblaws, Real Canadian Superstore, No Frills, Zehrs, T&T Supermarket and Shoppers Drug Mart. He was the third-wealthiest Canadian in 2025, with a net worth of $20.6 billion.
The company’s stock has more than tripled since the COVID-19 pandemic, with earnings up 11.6 per cent in 2025. This is despite paying out $500 million in a class-action settlement from a bread price-fixing scheme.
The other “Big Five” food companies in Canada include Sobeys (that owns Safeway, IGA, FreshCo and Farm Boy), Metro (that owns Super C, Food Basics and Jean Coutu), Costco and Walmart. Together, the Big Five control roughly 80 per cent of the grocery market.
Rethinking food systems
The bottom line is that people are hungry and food is expensive. We’ve replaced human labour with automated self-checkouts. Misshapen vegetables are wasted at the farm due to strict grocery store specifications of shape and size.
Food is spoiled in transit or held up at borders. Grocery stores purposefully over-buy to give the sense of abundance in store aisles all while throwing a lot of it out.
The problem lies not in people ringing in organic bananas for the non-organic ones, but in the way we buy and sell food more broadly. Canadians are already fed up with the business-as-usual of large commercial retail grocery stores — perhaps the recent militarized surveillance might serve as a collective breaking point.
There are better alternatives: farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture and the mounting support for public grocery stores are all more sustainable on several social, ecological and economic markers.
Food should be a human right, not one protected by pricey surveillance systems to protect corporate profits. Our collective purchasing power can exercise the kinds of food systems we want, and the ones we can no longer tolerate.
About the Author: Alissa Overend is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, MacEwan University
This article originally appeared in The Conversation.
Having a sociology professor analyze grocery retailing is like asking a drama teacher to give an expert opinion on cardiology. This article is full of the same half-baked complaints about market concentration and baseless assertions of corporate mismanagement that are often made about the banking, mobile, airline and other industries in Canada. The facts are simple. Canada is an extremely large country (second-largest in the world by area) with a comparatively small population. Serving a small population spread out over a large area is expensive, particularly in industries like retail which require physical logistics. This is why many international companies have declined to enter the Canadian market: it simply isn’t sufficiently lucrative. The federal government formally reached out a few years ago to several multinational grocery chains, inviting them to set up shop in Canada, and had exactly zero takers. (A previous Canadian government tried a similar tactic with U.S. mobile company Verizon, which was equally fruitless.) The financial realities of serving a small population over a large area mean that to do so effectively, a company needs sufficient scale. These are facts that a business professor would know, but a sociology professor would not understand.
The professor’s other assertions are equally ludicrous. She suggests farmer’s markets and co-operatives are part of the solution for food affordability. Farmer’s markets are wonderful, but they are hardly budget-friendly. Food is almost always significantly more expensive than at supermarkets (though the quality is excellent). Co-ops and other community-owned retailers consistently charge higher prices for the same groceries sold at major chains. How does this help affordability?
And the comment that grocery chains knowingly over-buy products simply to create attractive displays is utterly laughable. No successful business intentionally purchases goods far beyond what they know they can sell, only to consistently dispose of the merchandise at a loss. This would be a recipe for financial failure–which, again, an actual business professor would understand. Her theory also makes zero sense in light of her complaints about the financial success of major grocers in terms of stock price and earnings.