Henry Oliver popped in for a pie and left with a tote bag full of free market economics.
While taking my son on a school holiday outing to St Heliers, a well-heeled beachside suburb to the east of Auckland city, I stopped into the local Four Square to buy him a pie and got chatting with a smartly dressed man on the younger side of middle-age as he restocked the eggs. He was smiley and friendly and seemed to be followed around the store, as if in his shadow, by James Christmas, the Act Party candidate for Tāmaki in the forthcoming election.
Once I found the requested mince and cheese pie and made my way to the checkout, there he was again. There was no one in line behind me so we got chatting. He was unusually keen to talk about politics. He seemed particularly concerned about the growing calls from National to break up the supermarket duopoly of Foodstuffs (who owns the Four Square brand as well as New World and Pak’nSave) and Woolworths (who owns the Woolworths brand). “They wanted to do it all term,” he said as I wondered who “we” was. “We blocked them from doing it in government, so they decided to make it an election issue. I think a lot of people in the National Party were astonished to learn they had introduced this policy.”
He wasn’t wearing a uniform, which was odd, or a name tag, but I think he said his name was David Seymour. And he seemed to know a lot about the National Party and the coalition government. I guess Christmas, who’d been a list candidate for National last election but after jumping ship to Act was considered one of its rising stars, was pretty connected in Wellington. Maybe they talked a lot about politics and economic policy, too. Either way, Seymour seemed to have done a lot of maths around what breaking up the duopoly might mean for the average New Zealander.
“Even if all of the so-called excess profit went away, it would save 20c per person per day,” he said. “And if a business is not profitable, no one’s going to invest in new stores, new trucks, new distribution centres or new software, so you won’t actually have a supermarket industry. Not only is it a bad policy in itself, it’s the sense of political panic that underlies the National Party, giving up on such a core principle that they were founded upon. And as a very prominent supporter of theirs said to me recently, if I can’t trust them to stand up on this principle, what can I rely on them to stand by?”
Wow, I thought, this guy really doesn’t like the National Party. He kept going. “Instead of talking about how we solve New Zealand’s problems,” he said, “we’re now playing defence against completely insane solutions that will make the problems worse.”
As a supermarket worker I assumed he’d be brand loyal, but still, he must buy groceries too, and even with a staff discount, he’d know how expensive it was to live in this country at the moment. So, I wondered how he thought we might get prices down when there are only two main competitors in the market. “Sometimes people mix up the intensity of competition with the number of competitors,” he said. “With the supermarkets, they’re saying there’s not enough competitors, but it’s quite possible for two competitors to compete intensely. Have a look at wide-body jets. There’s only Boeing and Airbus, but they fight like ferrets on crack for market share.”
At The Spinoff’s Great Mt Albert Debate, I’d heard an Act candidate talk about freezing the minimum wage for two years to help small businesses. As a supermarket worker who can’t be on much more than minimum wage, I thought he’d be concerned. If food will continue to get more expensive over the next two years (and even if inflation returned to normal, that’d still be around 2% a year), how’d that improve the people on the sharp end of the cost of living crisis?
“There’s a fundamental misunderstanding about where wealth comes from in this debate,” he said, as I folded my arms, half expecting a pitch to join his workers’ consciousness-raising group, though I was quickly disabused of that notion. “People are saying if we freeze the minimum wage, there won’t be any wage increases. Well, yes, there will. Wages get higher when there’s investment and innovation. People get more skilled and experienced, then they produce more. Their business has more to sell, they take home more, and businesses pay more because they want to keep good people.”
He said he talks to a lot of young people who are not in employment, education or training (“NEETs” I think they’re called) and they tell him it’s an old-fashioned catch-22. “They keep telling me ‘I need experience to get a job, but I need a job to get experience.’ If you have a high minimum wage, it’s much easier to take someone who’s already got experience than to offer a chance to someone who doesn’t. So we’re not stopping wages going up. We are putting a rung at the bottom of the ladder, so more people can start climbing.”
It’s been around 27 years since I worked at a supermarket, so maybe I wasn’t as up on how things work in there, but I still wasn’t sure how allowing supermarkets to pay people less in real terms meant that they would actually end up paying more people more money. But he had a lot of big ideas and talked about them with such energy and conviction that, at the very least, he’d certainly convinced himself, even if I wasn’t so sure.
For such an energetic person with such conviction, I wondered what his ambitions were beyond the St Heliers Four Square – not that there’s anything wrong with working at the St Heliers Four Square. Maybe he’s putting that passion into something else – writing a novel, perhaps, or building an elaborate toy train set in his basement.
It turns out that he is, in fact, looking for work. He’s planning to accelerate his job search in early November and is keen to start in January next year. I asked him what jobs he’d had previously. “My first job was in a sawmill, earning $7.50 an hour, so I’d have had to work about 50 minutes to afford that pie,” he told me. In high school, a few suburbs over at Auckland Grammar School, he’d mown lawns. “I took leaflets around my suburb, all handwritten, and asked people to call me. I had two missed calls on the answerphone, because it was the 1990s. I got two customers, so I was mowing lawns for years.”
So, I wondered, what’s he aiming for with his next employment? And, beyond that, what was his dream job? “I think this country needs people with cool heads in cabinet who don’t panic politically and introduce crazy policy,” he said, though I had no idea what he was talking about. I couldn’t see any cabinets around. “That’s where I’m aiming to be, but really it’s up to the voters.”
I still didn’t understand, so asked if he was aiming for the top job. What I meant was whether he wanted to become the manager of Four Square St Heliers, or even own his own supermarket someday. But I think he thought I was getting at something else as he answered cryptically: “I think it’s Kenny Rogers who said, ‘there’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done’.”
I pretended to understand while, over my shoulder, I noticed the two owners of the store paying close attention to what we were saying. Maybe they’d been listening all along. Someone else had even been filming us talking and I certainly didn’t want to get this guy in trouble, so I left it there, thanked him for the pie and delivered it to my son, who immediately asked why I hadn’t bought any tomato sauce.
