General Debate 24 September 2026
A Pak’n’Save store owner writes to Chloe
A must read Facebook post from a small business owner, whose business Chloe wants to confiscate off her.
Aroha Tahau writes:
Dear Chlöe,
I have been up since 4am this morning.
It is raining. I am 16 weeks pregnant, and I have left my children at home with my partner, who will get them ready, take them to school and then come straight into work alongside me.
And strangely enough, I am still excited to go to work.
I am writing this because lately I have found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the political narrative I hear about supermarket owners, the supermarket “duopoly”, business owners and profit, with the life my partner and I are actually living.
I don’t pretend to understand every part of the economics or politics of the supermarket industry. I am relatively new to it. But I do understand what it looks like from the floor of a small Four Square in one of New Zealand’s most remote communities.
And I would genuinely like you to understand our perspective too.
Before this, my partner Carl and I lived a very different life.
We spent around a decade in France while he played professional rugby. We lived on the French Riviera. We travelled, we experienced extraordinary things, met incredibly successful people and, by most measures, had a pretty phenomenal life.
We could probably have continued that life for considerably longer.
But at some point, having a good life isn’t enough. We wanted something meaningful.
Through people we knew in the supermarket industry, including seeing the impact people such as Eric Rush had been able to have on their teams and communities, we became attracted to supermarket ownership.
Not because we thought selling groceries sounded glamorous.
Because owning a Four Square puts you in a position within a community where you can actually contribute something positive.
So we packed up our lives and brought our family home.
Our children went from an affluent French-speaking school environment to English-speaking schooling in New Zealand and then, eventually, to full-immersion kura kaupapa Māori on the East Coast. We wanted our children to know their culture, their language and where they came from.
Our first business opportunity on the East Coast didn’t work out. There were plenty of reasons for that, and it would have been very easy to pack up and leave.
Instead, we stayed.
We started working at Four Square Ruatoria.
Then, in January 2026, the East Coast flooded.
That period probably showed me more clearly than anything else why I wanted to be part of this industry.
Our own children had to leave the Coast, so we took them to Papamoa to be with family. Carl and I then left them there and returned to the East Coast, not knowing when we would see them again, because communities here had been cut off and there was work to do.
On my way back, I stopped — completely unannounced — at New Worlds and PAK’nSAVEs along the way asking for help.
The response was never, “What’s in it for us?”
It was:
“What do you need?”
“Your trailer isn’t big enough.”
“We can give you more.”
I returned to the Coast loaded with food.
We sat with whānau and local crisis teams trying to understand what communities actually needed. What people told us was interesting: they weren’t necessarily frightened about that day. Civil Defence and government support were getting food through.
They were frightened about what happened when that support stopped.
Through the Foodstuffs network and charitable support, systems were put in place to continue getting food into isolated communities. At times, transport movements costing thousands of dollars were being made to serve relatively tiny populations.
Was every one of those trips economically sensible in isolation?
Probably not.
Was it the right thing to do?
Absolutely.
And that distinction matters.
A few months later, Four Square Ruatoria became available, and Carl and I were fortunate enough to become its owners.
We now live and operate a supermarket in a community hours from a major centre.
Yesterday is a perfect example of what that means.
Our delivery couldn’t make it to us.
I called a PAK’nSAVE owner in Gisborne and explained the situation.
His response was essentially: “What do you need? Send me the list. We’ll get it ready.”
So my partner got into his truck and drove to Gisborne. We knew he wouldn’t be home until around 10pm.
Why?
Because this morning our community needed fruit and kai on the shelves.
That is the “duopoly” from where I am standing.
It is a cooperative network that means a little supermarket in Ruatoria can access supply, logistics, buying power, knowledge and support that I struggle to imagine could otherwise economically reach us.
I’m not suggesting the supermarket industry is perfect. Of course it isn’t.
Nor am I suggesting that supermarkets shouldn’t face scrutiny, regulation or be challenged to do better.
But I struggle with a narrative that reduces people like us to greedy supermarket owners interested only in profit.
Yes, I want to make money.
I want a good life for my family.
I don’t apologise for that.
I am prepared to work extraordinarily hard for it, too.
For the past three months, Carl and I have routinely started around 5am and finished around 10pm. Often the time we spend with our children is while they are with us at the shop.
One of the reasons we chose this life was because we wanted our children to see what hard work and service look like.
Three weeks after taking ownership, it was our seven-year-old son’s birthday.
He asked me what we were doing for his birthday.
I told him, “Boy, we’re doing a sausage sizzle. You can give away free sausages and kai to the community for your birthday.”
He was thrilled.
Most seven-year-olds probably wouldn’t spend their birthday helping their parents run a free community sausage sizzle.
But I looked at him that day and thought: this is exactly why we’re doing this.
He is learning that success isn’t just about what you can accumulate. It is also about what your position allows you to give.
Since taking over the store, we have invested in improving it because we want Ruatoria to have a supermarket people are proud of. We’ve painted the interior and exterior. We’re investing back into the store while carefully managing the cash flow of a young business. We employ around 20 local people.
One of my greatest ambitions is to develop our team and expose them to opportunities they might otherwise never receive.
We are looking at taking one of our young team members to Auckland for development. When we talked about it, he told me he had never really been anywhere beyond Gisborne.
How cool is it that a little supermarket can potentially open that door for someone?
Even seemingly insignificant things matter.
We bought children’s shopping trolleys for the store. That’s completely normal in plenty of supermarkets around New Zealand.
Here, they’re exciting.
A nanny recently told me she didn’t even need groceries, but the children insisted they come into Four Square because they wanted to push the little trolleys around.
That’s tiny.
But it creates joy.
And sometimes, in a small rural community, tiny things aren’t actually tiny.
One interaction in our first couple of weeks of ownership will probably stay with me forever.
An older kuia approached me in an aisle and asked whether Carl and I were the new owners.
I said yes.
She became teary and asked if she could hug me.
She told me how proud she was that their community had Māori owners of their supermarket.
I cannot put a dollar value on that.
And that is ultimately why I wanted to write to you.
When politicians talk about “the supermarkets”, “the duopoly”, “profits” and business owners, those words eventually land on real people.
They land on us.
They land on a pregnant woman getting up at 4am in the rain.
They land on a husband driving six or seven hours because a truck didn’t arrive and his community needs fresh food.
They land on two parents whose children sometimes spend their birthdays at the supermarket.
They land on the wages of 20 people in a small East Coast town.
They land on a young employee who might get on a plane and see Auckland for the first time.
And they land on an elderly kuia who cried because she was proud that people from her own culture owned an important business in her community.
I am not asking you to stop scrutinising supermarkets.
I am not asking you to believe our industry is perfect.
And I am certainly not asking you to feel sorry for us. We chose this. We love it.
What I am asking is that when we debate the future of supermarkets and businesses in New Zealand, we remember that not every business owner is a faceless corporation sitting in an office calculating how much they can extract from a customer.
Some of us live amongst the people we serve.
Our customers are our neighbours.
Our employees are people whose children go to school with ours.
When the road closes, we are cut off too.
When the community struggles, we see it at the checkout.
And when something goes wrong, people don’t call a corporate office.
They walk down the aisle and find us.
There needs to be room in our political conversation for scrutiny of profit and recognition of enterprise, risk, service and hard work.
Because if we create a country where making money through hard work is inherently treated with suspicion, or where every successful business is assumed to have succeeded at somebody else’s expense, I worry about what we are teaching the next generation.
I want my children to believe they can work hard, take risks, create employment, make money, contribute to their community and be proud of all of those things at the same time.
Those things do not have to be mutually exclusive.
So Chlöe, if you’re ever on the East Coast, come and see us.
Come to Ruatoria.
Come behind the counter. Meet our team. Drive the roads our freight travels. See what happens when the truck doesn’t turn up. Talk to the whānau who shop with us.
You may still disagree with me on plenty.
That’s okay.
But I think you might leave understanding that behind a word like “duopoly” can sit something far more human than our political debate sometimes allows for.
Aroha Tahau
Owner-Operator
Four Square Ruatoria
