This week, nearly 4,000 Metro grocery stores workers in the Greater Toronto Area will enter the second month of their strike. The sticking point is wages: they would really, really like an extra $2 an hour, akin to the “hero pay” they got in the early days of the pandemic.

So far, Metro has not entertained that, even as the company has unveiled “massive” profits and seen fit to sharply jack up compensation for executives. But there’s another indication that the company may have more cash on hand than it knows what to do with — one that hasn’t been discussed or reported on to nearly the same extent.

Last year, Metro spent $470 million on buying its own stock. The other major grocery chains, Empire and Loblaw, spent $248 million and $1.2 billion on buybacks, respectively. The economist Jim Stanford, the director of the Centre for Future Work, estimates that for half that amount, the three companies could have given each of their workers an extra $2 an hour and still have had a billion left over for buybacks.

On this week’s CANADALAND, Cherise Seucharan explains just what the heck that all means and why, even in the best of economic times, some economists still consider stock buybacks to be a highly questionable (albeit totally legal) business practice.