Inside Loblaw CEO’s unlikely meeting with boycott organizer

Emily Johnson got to the coffee shop early and didn’t order anything right away. She’d had almost no sleep. The night before she stayed up until 3 am. playing Super Smash Bros. online with a friend halfway across the world, trying to quiet the thoughts in her head.

She kept second-guessing herself, worried that she’d made the wrong call, that she should never have agreed to show up at this coffee shop, that the meeting she was about to have would destroy the national movement she created from her bedroom.

Johnson, the 29-year-old social worker and single mom who started a national boycott of Loblaw earlier this year, staked out a table near the front door and waited. Any minute, Loblaw’s CEO, Per Bank, was going to walk in and sit down with her.

“I was so anxious,” she said. She focused on breathing.

“Be yourself,” she remembered thinking. “Do the best you can.”

Johnson’s boycott caught a wave of resentment at just the right time, after two years of heavy inflation, with shoppers questioning how food prices kept rising while a handful of big grocers grew their profits.

Some of the more skeptical members of Johnson’s boycott team warned her not to take the meeting. Bank was in charge of the biggest grocer in the country, and earned more than $22 million last year. They were sure he’d try to bully her, threaten her, pay her off — anything to shut her up. And shutting up at that point, at the beginning of May, would have let down tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters across the country who were ready to take a stand.

So she went. And at 2:30 p.m.. on May 2, at a Starbucks in a Milton shopping plaza, Bank walked in wearing a light blue button-up shirt, slacks and a backpack.

When all this started, last fall, Johnson was about a year into a new job working with people on probation.

She spends her work days driving around and meeting with clients, who have addiction or mental health issues. Some live in shelters, or in tents in public parks. They’ll go for coffee or a walk and she’ll talk to them about their goals, or help edit a resume or practice for a job interview.

“Some folks just really need someone to talk to,” she said.

Those meetings are little windows into the lives of other people. And she watched those people slowly accept a worse and worse standard of living as the inflation crisis wore on.

She struggled too. In 2022, as food prices spiked at a rate not seen since the early 1980s, she was single and on maternity leave with her second son, living off unemployment benefits.

“I was just constantly juggling payday loans, or you know, paying people back,” she said.

In November, Johnson started a page on Reddit called Loblaws is Out of Control, as a place to “just kind of collectively screech into a therapeutic void” about the cost of food.

Through the winter, the page gained thousands of members, which Johnson believes was spurred on by news that Loblaw watered down its discount on soon-to-expire goods. (Facing backlash, the company reversed that decision.)

Some of the Reddit members started talking about taking action. So after a series of polls, she and her team announced a boycott for the month of May, targeting Loblaw and its more than 2,450 stores — mostly because it was, by far, the biggest grocer in the country.

By late April, media outlets around the country were paying attention to the boycott, and Johnson’s subreddit had more than 50,000 members.

On April 23, Johnson got an email from a Loblaw spokesperson, asking if she’d be open to a meeting.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God. What do we do?’ ” she said.

At that point, she was running a team of about eight volunteer organizers spread across the country who did most of the planning and logistic work on the boycott. None of them had ever met in person. They talked almost exclusively over the online chat app Discord.

After the invitation from Loblawthey held a meeting on Discord and it was “the most divided we’ve ever been, to date,” she said.

“We were split right down the middle about this.”

One half, including Johnson, saw the meeting as a chance for the group to influence Bank and make a difference. The other half thought it was a trap — some kind of PR ploy, or worse.

On the other side, at Loblaw headquarters in Brampton, Per Bank was pushing his team to set up the meeting, though not everyone was on board.

“Some people thought it was too risky,” he said.

One of their concerns, Bank recalled, was that Johnson could come out of the meeting and say something like, “Per Bank, he’s not listening. He’s just like any other big CEO who makes too much money.”

Since taking over at Loblaw, Bank had made a point of meeting with customers. He has a blunt, no-nonsense way of speaking that comes off more funny than rude.

When he arrived in Canada last year, after more than a decade as the CEO of the Danish retail giant Salling Group, he said he liked to walk up to random people in parking lots and stores and ask what they thought of Loblawwithout saying who he was, trying to get a real sense of what people in Canada thought of the chain he was taking over.

He said he’d ask questions like: “I’m new to Canada, could you please advise me where to do my grocery shopping?”

When the boycott took off, he said he wanted to meet Johnson as part of that same get-to-know-your-customers exercise.

“One customer not shopping in our stores is one too many,” he said. “That’s my attitude. That’s why I need to take everything like this seriously. And of course, it has been getting a lot of media attention.”

Tea Loblaw team suggested Johnson meet Bank at a No Frills store close to where she lives. Johnson wanted something more neutral, so she asked to meet at a Starbucks nearby.

The night before the meeting, she kept playing through all the ways the meeting could backfire, afraid that she was a sucker, that she’d let herself be manipulated.

The next morning she got the kids up, made them Eggos in the airfryergot them dressed and piled them into her blue Mazda.

First she dropped her younger son at daycare, then her older son, who is non-verbal and has autism, at school.

Before the meeting, she put on a black dress from Suzy Shier with bright red roses on it.

“It’s my favorite dress,” she said. “I was like, this is a power suit kind of meeting, you know?”

That morning, on May 2, Loblaw was holding its annual general meeting for shareholders. The company had just reported a nearly 10 per cent jump in profits during the first quarter, compared to last year, and rewarded its shareholders with $470 million in share buybacks and a 15 per cent dividend hike — the largest increase to Loblaw’s quarterly dividend in at least 15 years.

At the Loblaw AGMBank and chair Galen Weston — the longtime face of the company as its TV pitchman — both described the boycott as “misguided.”

“Loblaw is not responsible for higher food prices,” Weston said. “Inflation is a global issue.”

As the meeting went on, Johnson was getting disgruntled messages from her organizing team.

“Everyone on the team was abuzz about it. They were like, ‘He said that this is misguided and blah blah blah blah blah.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, I’m still meeting with him. So, whatever.’ ”

After the AGMBank drove to the Starbucks in Milton from Loblaw’s headquarters in Brampton.

(He wouldn’t say what sort of car he drives. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s not a fast car. It’s a normal car.”)

When Bank arrived, Johnson wanted to pay for his coffee. There was a symbolism in there somewhere that she liked.

Standing outside, across the parking lot, two of Johnson’s lieutenants were trying to get a sense of what was going on.

Kathryn Jones, a counselor in Waterloo who joined the organizing committee after seeing Johnson on TV, was driving home from a vacation with her husband and happened to be passing by Milton around the time of the big meeting, so she decided to stop by to offer any support she could. Another organizer showed up too.

They watched Bank and Johnson get in line, waiting to order, and from Bank’s gestures, Jones said she could tell what was happening. “It almost looked like he was saying, ‘Oh, no, no, no, I’ve got the coffee.’ Or at least that’s what I imagined he was saying,” Jones said.

Each of them ordered an Americans, Bank’s treat, and they sat at a table by the front. A high school must have just let out. Students were streaming in and out, Jones said. But judging from the body language, the two seemed relaxed.

“Lots of nodding on both sides,” Jones said. And they were leaning forward in their chairs, not back.

“This is wild,” Jones remembered thinking to herself, spying across the parking lot at the crowded suburban coffee where an ordinary, frustrated shopper was now voicing her concerns directly to the head of the biggest grocery chain in the country.

Inside the coffeeone of the first things Bank mentioned was that “Galen said to say ‘hi,’ ” according to Johnson.

She remembered thinking Bank was much taller than she’d expected. They talked about how he was new to Canada, and how his family had stayed behind in Denmark. She showed him pictures of her kids and he showed her pictures of his.

“She has two boys and I have two boys,” Bank said. “We were just discussing about having boys instead of girls. It’s a lot of hard work when they’re small. They’re all over the place.”

Johnson came with a list of questions. She said she asked why Loblaw wouldn’t sign the code of conduct, about the profit and dividend increases, competition issues in the sector and the controversial receipt scanners that made some customers feel the chain was treating them like criminals.

She said Bank told her Loblaw was changing its tune on the code, and that the scanners were meant to deter organized criminals, who have been stealing millions from retailers and reselling the goods online. Johnson told him Loblaw needed to be clearer with the public, so people understood that the chain was cracking down on professional thieves, not chasing after desperate people stealing food to feed their family in the middle of an affordability crisis.

“They see Jean Valjean out there, getting scooped up and arrested,” she recalled telling him.

They talked for about an hour. Johnson’s two supporters in the parking lot eventually stopped watching through the window and got a table on the patio at East Side Mario’s next door. Johnson joined them after the meeting, ordered a sangria and started talking fast, about what he said and how she felt and why it was probably a good thing she decided to take the meeting.

Nothing Bank said made her want to call off the boycott, but just sitting across from him and listening for an hour, something started to slowly dawn on her.

“I thought I was expecting a very cold business man,” she said.

He wasn’t. She said he came off mostly as somebody’s dad, a bit dorky in the way dads can be. He told her if he hadn’t become a CEO, he might have been a kindergarten teacher, and she could picture it. It made sense.

“It would have been so much easier if he was a lizard person or something,” Johnson said.

Bank had a similar feeling. After the meeting, he still thought it was “completely unfair” that the boycott was singling out Loblaw for an issue that was impacting industries around the world. But he said he got why Johnson did it.

They exchanged email addresses and continued to send notes back and forth, weeks after the meeting.

“I really like her,” he said.

“I listened to her. She listened to me.”