OTTAWA – A meeting convened with Canada’s top grocery CEOs to discuss soaring prices stalled this week, as the executives directed Trudeau to conduct his own discussion with their automated self-serve negotiator.
“Canadians are hurting due to skyrocketing grocery prices, and today we’re going to do something about it,” Trudeau declared directly to the automated kiosk’s bright LED monitor. Though executives from Loblaw, Metro, Empire, Walmart, and Costco were not in attendance, Canada’s Prime Minister gamely attempted to deliver his message by navigating the machine’s various touch screen options.
While Prime Minister Trudeau, as well as Finance Minister Freeland and Minister of Innovation Champagne, had expected to meet with the human CEOs and top VPs of the grocery chains, they were reportedly surprised when the only option available was the newly-designed Executron-3000.
Calling the meetings “historic and constructive”, Trudeau and his assembled ministers set to work admonishing the self-service machine about this year’s 8.5 per cent rise in grocery prices, as well as companies’ record profits.
“I think I’m really getting through to it,” Trudeau declared confidently, before pressing the on-screen icon for ‘lower grocery prices’, but then somehow being directed back to the main menu.
Reports indicate that Trudeau did not have enough Optimum points to redeem for a nationwide price freeze.
“It says here I can’t scan and have to manually enter the code for ‘examine record profit margins’, which I thought I did, but then I just get an error saying something about ‘supply chain costs’,” Trudeau added in frustration, as the self-serve meeting stretched on far past the scheduled time.
“It would have been way faster to just do this with a human being,” Freeland noted, before a light flashed, and a prompt directed the elected officials to stand by and wait for a floor manager to key in their override code.
While Canada’s Federal Liberals have had strong words for grocery CEOs, particularly in the face of low polling numbers, Trudeau dismissed concerns that the industry leaders were not taking him seriously by sending the Executron-3000 in their place.
“I’m sure that doing all the negotiating myself with this machine will result in some kind of cost savings, that will then be passed on to Canadian consumers,” Trudeau added, before being charged a 5¢ ‘political grandstanding fee’. The kiosk then displayed a standard corporate charity prompt, asking, “Would you like to give us a $10 million tax credit?” though there appeared to be no option to decline.
Reached for comment, Loblaws executive chairman and president Galen Weston Jr. responded, “I’ll have another mimosa,” from 41,000 ft in the air aboard his private Gulfstream V jet.
In a related story, Trudeau’s affordability meeting with the heads of Canada’s major housing construction firms hit a snag when he discovered he would be CEOS had instead sent an unplugged cement mixer for him to talk to.
