Sears stiffs its staff while vulture capitalists profit. Discuss

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner on July 10, 2017. On Friday, I was mindlessly meandering the aisles of my local Superstore, foraging for food and filling time, when I chanced on a conversation at the pharmacy. A man was paying for a prescription. “Just six dollars,” the woman behind the counter said […]

Sobeys Safeway meltdown

The early morning conference call to discuss Empire Company Ltd.’s fourth-quarter results began as scheduled at 8 a.m. ADT, June 29, 2016. It was supposed to last an hour. Instead, the question-and-answer session plunged past 95 minutes. That’s because more than the usual number of retail stock market analysts queued up to electronically question the […]

What does Sobeys really regret?

If you’d like an object lesson in how not to conduct corporate public relations, consider how Sobeys, the iconic, Nova Scotia-rooted company that operates the second largest supermarket chain in the country, bungled a racial profiling case. The story began back in May 2009 when an assistant manager at the Sobeys Hammonds Plains outlet confronted […]

Racism’s crime: ‘devaluing of self and others’

Where to begin? With the too-soon deaths of three young black men murdered in separate incidents within a week last month? Or with last Monday’s announcement the provincial government is restructuring — which is to say eliminating — a community-based program in North and East Preston, Cherry Brook and Lake Loon that had been helping […]

Northern Pulp, the Sobeys and the lessons unlearned

Nova Scotia is a small, interconnected, even inbred political, economic and social ecosystem. So it was intriguing last month to hear former Empire CEO Paul Sobey publicly rail against the dense “haze of emissions” spewing forth daily from Pictou County’s Northern Pulp mill, stinking up the community in which he lives and in which his […]