Pete Buttigieg's consulting clients include an Arrested Development joke

(Image credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

published 11 December 2019

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg just disclosed the companies he worked with as a consultant for McKinsey & Co. between 2007 and 2010. On the list, among clients like the U.S. Postal Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council and Best Buy, was the Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws. Here's how he described his six-month stint in Toronto with Loblaws to The Atlantic's Edward-Isaac Dovere on Tuesday:

[Loblaws] was looking to cut prices, and brought him in to figure out how to do it in a way that would actually help the bottom line. The analysis he built, Buttigieg told me, was millions of lines of data. It was too big for Excel, so he put it into a different program that needed to be run through a special laptop that he toted around and nicknamed Bertha. "There's an exquisite science to this, because it all depends on how many competing stores are in the same area," Buttigieg said, in a very Buttigiegian sentence. ..."It's a bit silly to talk about a specialty at all in a career that lasted two years," Buttigieg conceded, while pointing out that the six months he spent in Toronto is long for a McKinsey project. "But," he added with a sprinkle of self-awareness, "to the extent that I was uniquely qualified on something, it was definitely Canadian grocery prices." [The Atlantic]

Bob Loblaw was (presumably) unavailable for comment.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.