Foodstuffs Appointment of Joyce a Positive Sign

Foodstuffs North Island’s appointment of Stephen Joyce to its board is the best news I’ve heard for beleaguered grocery consumers for a while.

Some people will be cynical. He will be but one of eleven directors, eight of them grocers and three independent. And Foodstuffs North Island is only one of three massive companies heading the Foodstuffs empire – not forgetting a multiplicity of less prominent but similarly loaded entities behind the scenes where the profits are dispersed.  Then of course there’s Woolworths Australia. So some will understandingly dismiss his appointment as window dressing.

Me? Not so. I’ve had a fair amount to do with Stephen in a past life and rate him among the half dozen best political leaders of my lifetime.

Most important, he has a genuine empathy for Kiwis across the spectrum and knows what makes us tick – empathy derived from being a trolley boy at his parents’ supermarket, becoming a DJ, building a radio network, then becoming one of a handful of Kiwis to walk off the street straight into a Cabinet role. (That empathy seems a dying quality among the naïve, right-leaning politicians of today who mentally divide our citizens into “wealthy and sorted” and “dropkicks,” with a belief that the latter are underserving layabouts with only themselves to blame for their impoverished state.)

I suspect Stephen could articulate far better than many of today’s leaders the importance of the social contract under which a civilized society looks after the less advantaged.

Further, he is a great deal-maker. He showed that by engineering the “voluntary” split of Telecom into wholesale (Chorus) and retail (Spark) arms, neatly solving a competition issue that had bedeviled other political leaders for years without a drop of blood on the table.

And he has an engaging style and sense of humour – never better illustrated than in 2016 at Waitangi when a protester threw a dildo which hit him in the face and he responded with a cheerful “goodo.”

But if I wanted more reassurance that Stephen is the right fit for Foodstuffs at this time, I found it in a column he wrote for the NZ Herald four months ago showing a deep understanding of our country’s market failure issues. He  urged that Foodstuffs and Woolworths seize the initiative by front-footing a breakup before the regulators do it for them. I agree with every word of his analysis in that article – with hindsight it almost reads like a job application for the Foodstuffs directorship.

That’s why I take today’s news as a positive sign.

Retail grocers are not “bad” people. They cannot be happy about the bad light in which they are being portrayed through their industry’s price-gouging, shrinkflation and other anticompetitive activities.

Just like the telecommunications industry did in the 2000s, perhaps they have concluded the time is right to offer the government – and the citizens – their customers - an olive branch.

So the key question is whether the Joyce appointment is a PR gesture, or a signal of a genuine change of direction by the whole Foodstuffs organisation. I suspect we will know the answer in the next few weeks. Watch this space.