Attention all Thrifty Foods shoppers: There’s a petition in aisle 1.
Frustrated Thrifty Foods shoppers have launched an online petition to save the store’s Sapperton location at the Brewery District on Columbia Street.
So far, more than 1,000 people have penned their name to the online petition that is meant to make the case to keep the two-year-old grocery store.
Canada’s competition watchdog has ordered Sobeys to sell 23 grocery stores in Western Canada – including the Thrifty Foods in New Westminster – before it will approve a $5.8-billion purchase of grocer Safeway Canada.
The petition letter states that they would like to see one of the “many Safeway stores in New Westminster/Burnaby sold and replaced, and not the lone Thrifty Foods.”
“Safeway is a convenience and is not integrated into the community the way Thrifty Foods is,” states the petition that was launched by a woman named Janice Wormald-Twiss. The Record is trying to reach Wormald-Twiss for comment.
On the site, Wormald-Twiss writes that she received a “note from the Competition Bureau, so it looks like we got their attention by sending so many letters. I will mail the final petition to them when we reach 1,200. We're almost there.”
Sobeys spokesperson Andrew Walker told The Record that the petition would have no impact on the “agreement” between Sobeys and the Competition Bureau to sell the store.
"If you are asking me if it’s going to change the fact that we have to sell the Sapperton Thrifty Foods, no, it won’t,” said Walker.
“It’s not a matter of, ‘There’s four stores, pick one,’” he said.
According to the consent agreement with the Competition Bureau, Sobeys has to sell the store to a viable grocery retailer who will operate it as a grocery store, Walker said.
But the location will “cease to exist as a Thrifty’s,” he said.
“Whoever purchases it, it will become their store and they will operate it as a grocery store,” Walker said. But that will likely bring little consolation to the devoted Thrifty's shoppers. Click here to view the petition.
