Ever wonder what Canadians would do for some dirt-cheap corn? One clip might give you an idea.
A video, shot on Sunday, captured a crowd of shoppers wrestling over discounted corn in a No Frills grocery store in Markham, Ont, which is just north of Toronto.
An elderly man is even seen being knocked over onto a cardboard store display.
“I felt bad, actually,” said shopper Sunny Gandhi, who shot the footage. “At least give respect to the people around you. I think the store should do a better job of (getting) them lining up.”
Requests for comment from Loblaws, No Frills’ parent company, were not returned.
In the video, which has been viewed more than 641,000 times on Facebook, some people are even seen stepping into the corn crate to cash in on the deal.
According to an online flyer, the store was offering a sale on sweet corn over the Labour Day weekend: 12 ears of corn for $1.68.
Gandhi, who wasn’t in the store for corn, had to start filming because he’d seen people frantic during sales like at Best Buy but “nothing that I would record, really.”
A handful of Redditors were quick to call out the behavior online, with one saying “RedFlagDealers gone wild” and another saying “props to the dad with the kid attached to him for rushing to help the old guy up after falling.”
'Things got out of hand'
Labour Day falls right in the middle of the season for certain types of corn but that wouldn’t explain the mad dash of people in the video, according to a professor from the Rowe School of Business at Dalhousie University.
“I think it has more to do with the bargain and people wanting to have corn for the long weekend. The demand is usually higher,” Sylvain Charlebois said.
“It’s a bit ridiculous. Fighting over a few dollars is a bit unusual,” he chuckled. “Maybe there’s something in that corn I don’t know about.”
Charlebois didn’t believe it had anything to do with farm gate prices. Agricultural economist Philip Shaw agreed and called the incident an “anomaly.”
Sweet corn is available locally at mid-summer in Ontario and Shaw suspected that perhaps “things got out of hand” because demand outweighed the supply in this case.
