Le Panier Bleu

» see lepanierbleu.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Le Panier Bleu was created by the Government of Quebec in April 2020, a few weeks into the pandemic, as a nonprofit whose entire product was a list. Businesses registered, filled in a card about themselves, and the site pointed shoppers at them. It went up on 5 April 2020 and 2.7 million people visited it that day, which in a province of roughly eight and a half million is a number that ordinary marketing does not produce. Everybody was indoors and the local store had become an abstraction.

The list grew. A catalog of actual products arrived in October 2020 with Lightspeed's help, and by 2022 there were around 20,000 merchants and over two million items, with traffic handed off to each business's own shop. That was the model for two years: a public switchboard that sent you somewhere else to pay.

On 20 June 2022 it stopped being a government nonprofit. Le Panier Bleu was moved into a private company, Plateforme Agora Inc., with money from Desjardins. Investissement Québec and the Fonds de solidarité FTQ came in beside it. The original nonprofit was converted into the Produits du Québec certification label. On 5 October 2022 the site finally started taking the payment itself.

Sixteen months later it was finished. On 28 February 2024 Plateforme Agora ended the transactional platform, saying it had made a difficult decision after the province announced that the funding was stopping. As of 1 February 2024 the storefront carried 562 merchants and more than 262,000 products.

~ the chronicle ~

~ one afternoon in april ~

The launch-day figure carries the entire story, and the trap inside it. A directory that 2.7 million people open on the day their government announces it has not demonstrated demand for a directory. It has demonstrated that a premier can get 2.7 million people to click on something during a lockdown. Everything that followed was an attempt to find out which of those two things had actually happened.

~ from switchboard to checkout ~

The pivot is the part worth studying. For two years the site was deliberately modest: it took no payments and held no inventory, and it sent you to the merchant to buy. That version was cheap to run and genuinely useful, and 20,000 businesses joined it.

The transactional version launched in October 2022 and had 562 merchants on it at the end. The catalog went from two million products down to 262,000. Asking a corner shop to list itself in a public index is free. Asking it to wire its stock and its pricing into a provincial marketplace is a project, and most of them never took it on.

~ when the subsidy stopped ~

Quebec spent public money on this for four years and then declined to spend more, and the company closed the storefront within weeks of hearing so. The certification brand survived the shutdown. Produits du Québec, the label the original nonprofit turned into, still exists and still puts a mark on goods made in the province. The marketplace is the half that went.

Buy-local campaigns exist everywhere, and in Turkey as anywhere else they usually amount to a sticker in a shop window and a slogan on the radio. Quebec went and built the window, which is a far more expensive promise to make, and the bill for it arrived on schedule.

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