These are great questions. Thank you very much, Ms. Rood, for your interest in this, as always.
It's the standing practice to freeze around the holiday period, for both the stores and the customers, price increases on packaged goods. However, that only applies, historically for us—and I don't know what happens to our competitors—to about 90% of the packaged goods. Sometimes, under extenuating circumstances, there have been, I'd say, 1,700 to 2,000 price increases that go through in that period, so it's not a full freeze. This year, because of what's going on with inflation and because of the interest of Parliament and this committee, we have decided at Sobeys to freeze all packaged goods for the entirety of the period.
The reason we say “packaged goods”, which make up approximately 20,000 out of a normal store's 26,000 to 28,000 items, and not fresh, is that.... They're very different. The cost for fresh items can move daily in some cases, and certainly weekly. We're buying on the market, and the world and North American price can change, especially, as you can understand, for produce in the winter. It can change very quickly.
To be able to import and to make sure that we have fresh goods in our aisles, especially during the winter, we have to make sure that we can buy the product, and the price moves all the time. It can move up and it can move down. Since I talked to you last March, some of the products have moved up and some of the fresh products have actually moved down—