Miss something this week? Don’t panic. CBC’s Marketplace rounds up the consumer and health news you need.
Want this in your inbox? Get the Marketplace newsletter every Friday.
CBC investigation uncovers grocers overcharging customers by selling underweighted meat
A CBC News investigation discovered some Canadian grocers were found to be overcharging customers, potentially by including the weight of the packaging in the cost of meat, which over time could add up to millions in profit. One of the grocers has apologized and all have pledged to address the issue.
The Loblaw grocery chain overcharged customers by selling underweighted meat across 80 stores for an undisclosed period that ended in December 2023, a CBC News investigation has found.
On top of that, over the past few months, CBC News visited seven major grocery stores in three different provinces and discovered packages of underweighted meat in four of them: two Loblaw stores and one Sobeys-owned location, plus a Walmart. Calculated overcharges per item ranged from four to 11 per cent.
The findings suggest grocers selling underweighted meat is a prevalent and ongoing problem, at a time when shoppers are struggling with high food prices that began rising during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When you’re seeing that they’re not weighing meat product properly … there’s an extra hit there that the consumer is taking,” said Iris Griffin, a shopper who blew the whistle on the 80-store Loblaw case.
In late November 2023, Griffin, who lives on Hecla Island in Manitoba’s Lake Winnipeg, bought a package of ground beef at a Loblaw-owned Superstore in Winnipeg.
The beef’s label stated that its net weight was 1.834 kilograms. But when Griffin weighed the meat in order to freeze equal portions, she said it turned out to be 1.7 kg — 134 grams short.
She said the weight of the beef’s hard plastic tray made up for the missing weight, so she figures the meat had been incorrectly weighed with the packaging.
“I was angry,” said Griffin, who calculated she’d been overcharged $1.27 (7.9 per cent) on the $17.35 price tag. “I’m being charged for this piece of plastic at the price of the ground beef.”
Loblaw Companies Ltd. spokesperson Catherine Thomas said in an email that due to an error involving a change in packaging, the grocer sold “a small number” of underweighted meat products in 80 stores across Western Canada.
She didn’t address questions about when the problem started and how much customers were overcharged.
“We have robust internal processes and controls in place; however, they are subject to the occasional operational error,” Thomas said. “Even though 97 per cent of our [2,400] stores were unaffected, any pricing issue that results in an overcharge is one too many.” Read more
B.C. court approves class-action lawsuit about privacy over Home Depot receipts
A British Columbia Supreme Court judge says a class-action lawsuit alleging Home Depot violated its customers’ privacy when collecting and sharing their information after emailing purchase receipts can proceed.
The lawsuit alleges Home Depot gathered information when B.C. customers opted for emailed receipts, including the purchase price, brands bought and data related to the customer’s email address, then shared it without consent with technology giant Meta.
Justice Peter Edelmann allowed the certification of the class for the alleged breaches of privacy in a decision posted online Wednesday, but he dismissed claims that Home Depot violated other duties and contractual obligations.
The certification is not a finding of wrongdoing, and Home Depot did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The decision says that Meta, which operates Facebook, offered a service to help the company understand if its advertising campaigns on the social media platform were leading to in-store sales.
The court document says Home Depot argued customers had no reasonable expectation of privacy because the information shared with Meta was “high-level” and less sensitive, but Edelmann disagreed, saying that privacy expectations “cannot be assessed on a piecemeal basis.”
The decision says the claim involves more than six million emails and corresponding data shared with Meta over several years. The judge said the alternative to a class-action lawsuit would be hundreds of thousands of individual claims “which are simply not feasible.”
“The value of the individual claims would also make the costs of litigation prohibitive as individual claimants would be unlikely to recover the actual cost,” he said. Read more
Is it still ‘social media’ if it’s overrun by AI?
Back in 2010, a 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for Facebook — by that point a wildly popular social network with more than 500 million users.
“The primary thing that we focus on all day long is how to help people share and stay connected with their friends, family and the people in the community around them,” Zuckerberg told CNBC. “That’s what we care about, and that’s why we started the company.”
Fifteen years and three billion users later, Facebook’s parent company Meta has a new vision: characters powered by artificial intelligence existing alongside actual friends and family. Some experts caution that this could mark the end of social media as we know it.
For early users of social media, platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become “about as anti-social as you can imagine,” said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst and journalist based in London, Ont. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to connect with an actual human being.”
A story published last month by the Financial Times laid out Meta’s plans for artificially generated accounts on Facebook and Instagram, each with distinct characteristics, including racial and sexual identities.
“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content,” Connor Hayes, Meta’s vice-president of product for generative AI, told the paper.
The corporation started experimenting with them in 2023. After the Times story was published, some irritated users began a campaign to block and report the accounts. One journalist spoke to an AI account that presented itself as a Black queer woman — and admitted that its development team didn’t include any Black people.
Meta recently began quietly removing the profiles, which Meta Canada spokesperson Julia Perreira told CBC News were managed by humans and part of an “early experiment.”
The company deleted the accounts due to a bug that was “impacting users’ abilities to block them,” said Perreira. “[We] are removing those accounts to fix the issue,” she noted, but did not respond to a question about whether the accounts would be reinstated at a later date. Read more
What else is going on?
Frank And Oak seeks creditor protection while Ricki’s and Cleo shutter stores in retail shakeup
Parent companies blame pandemic for profitability challenges in retail sector
Hamilton landlord owes $27M, loses control over building where tenants faced water shut-off for 3 months
As real estate empire collapses, Dylan Suitor faces multiple lawsuits and a bankruptcy application
Meta is ending fact-checking in the U.S. Could that affect the vote in Canada?
Restrictions for some incendiary topics being lifted on Facebook, Instagram globally
Marketplace needs your help!
Do you have concerns about your kids’ data and privacy when they play mobile games? We want to hear from you! Email us at marketplace@cbc.ca.
We’re looking for Canadians who feel buried under their reusable bags. Think you’ve got the biggest stash in Canada? Prove it! Send us your pictures to marketplace@cbc.ca.
Mind Your Business is your weekly look at what’s happening in the worlds of economics, business and finance. Subscribe now.
Catch up on past episodes of Marketplace on CBC Gem.