WASHINGTON: Local government is getting into the US grocery business - but can city officials ever hope to run a corner store the way Mom and Pop used to do?
With the demise of thousands of grocery shops - victims of hostile market forces that were hastened by the pandemic - "food deserts” have opened up and left many rural and urban neighborhoods without good options. Once upon a time in America, many street corners could boast a family-run store peddling everything from food to pharma. Their rise through the 19th century peaked when bigger stores - promising choice, glitz, one-stop shopping and value - muscled in on their patch.
By about 1960, supermarket chains were selling 70 percent of groceries, upending the independent model. But the chains also had to close outlets in the pandemic, deciding it no longer made financial sense to keep operating in some of the country’s poorest neighborhoods. Their exit came just as many Americans struggled to afford the fast-rising cost of food, with inflation helping boost grocery prices by 11 percent from 2021 to 2022. All of which has now led city officials to think the unthinkable in a nation where government shies from meddling with a free market, whatever its effect on ordinary Americans.
Across the country, municipalities are asking if they should buy up grocery stores at risk of closing, or even open their own in food deserts that lack other options.
"In Chicago, half a million people are living in food deserts ... the markets have said, ‘We’re not serving them,’” said Ameya Pawar, a former Chicago City Council member and now a senior adviser with the non-profit Economic Security Project. "So in places where the markets won’t open a store, this is where a public option is an elegant solution,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
From 2021 to last year, at least six major grocery stores closed on Chicago’s poorer south and west sides, the city said. The Economic Security Project is working with the city of Chicago on a feasibility study, due for completion in coming months, on a municipally-owned grocery store.
Such a store "could break even or even lose money and get a subsidy,” Pawar said. "The goal is to increase life expectancy, reduce poverty - that’s a return. Make workers more productive because they have access to fresh food.” Critics call such a project wasteful, with one libertarian think tank saying it amounts to "subsidized dysfunction”.
The National Grocers Association declined to comment. FMI, the Food Industry Association, did not respond to a request for comment. But Chicago’s communities "deserve affordable, healthy groceries, especially in historically disinvested areas,” Mayor Brandon Johnson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a statement. "We are utilizing every tool in our toolbox to address food equity.” The work in Chicago follows a unique state law passed last year to address concerns over access to fresh food. It aims to open new stores, upgrade or expand existing ones, and creates funding to help municipalities or non-profits open groceries in what backers say could be a national model.
About 76 counties now lack a grocery store, according to Department of Agriculture statistics, while major chains have rapidly merged over the past half decade. Independent stores are juggling other threats - be it aging owners or depopulated communities, said Rial Carver, program leader with the Rural Grocery Initiative at Kansas State University. "In rural communities it’s especially critical because the options for those grocers or communities are limited. If one store closes, that means it’s likely the only option,” she said.
In Kansas alone, one in five rural grocery stores closed in the decade to 2018, she said, matching the national ratio. Beyond locals losing their access to food, store closures deal a blow to tax revenues, job options and community fabric. "The rural grocery store plays a role in attracting and retaining residents,” Carver said.
"We’ve heard examples of grocery stores closing, and the schools have a hard time staying open, or other critical infrastructure being impacted. They go hand in hand.” The initiative helps communities figure out options for keeping or opening a store - be it city-run or some sort of hybrid that could see a private operator use municipal property. Carver expects such options to see a wave of new attention.
In Sanger, Texas, Principal Anthony Love’s high school has run a student-run grocery store since 2020, after the city’s sole grocery store made way for a highway expansion. While the school had offered donated food for students to take home, Love said some refused out of embarrassment. Hence the grocery store concept, which cuts any shame. "It was my first year as principal. It definitely wasn’t something that was on my mind at that moment, but I knew there was a need,” Love said. The program was created with support from Texas Health Resources, a faith-based health provider that has helped build five such school projects and plans five more, said Marsha Ingle, a senior director with the non-profit system.
"Nationally, there has been tremendous interest,” she said. "It’s a larger conversation around making sure students have what they need in order to learn, and hungry kids do not learn very well.”
Publicly supported grocery stores are also being used to revitalize poor communities. Aaron "AJ” Johnson sees the new Oasis Fresh Market as a hub to rebuild a disinvested, mostly Black part of Tulsa, Oklahoma. When the market was created in 2021 through support from the city and federal government, it was the first full-service grocery store in North Tulsa in 14 years, and the first Black-owned store in a half century, Johnson said. "Imagine 14 years,” he said.
"This was a public health crisis in our community.” Now the store is hiring from within the community, helping connect locals to food assistance and other services - and sparking interest countrywide, Johnson said. Back in Illinois, a poor, mostly Black community in the state’s far south is likewise hoping to create a city-owned grocery store as the centerpiece of a wider revitalization. — Reuters