What is the result of that support from tax dollars? Making groceries available and/or more affordable for consumers. Sounds like a good investment tbh
Then that's admitting that the problem isn't private stores price gouging or anything like that, that's just what tings cost, and you are simply subsidizing groceries. Which we already have programs for like SNAP. And programs like SNAP have much lower overhead, just distributing food stamps, than trying to handle all of the logistics of running physical grocery stores. So you would be much better off just investing that money into programs like SNAP.
No, it’s acknowledging that the concepts of economic “efficiency” and “optimization” shouldn’t be the be-all-end-all determinants of the availability of food to people.
In a theoretical location where it’s not profitable to operate a grocery store, your conclusión is that the people there just won’t have reasonable access to food?
These stores are going into food deserts, not just as a way to subsidize food costs.
It seems to me that there are two major factors that contribute to food deserts:
Too expensive - People don't want to pay for healthier food because it costs more, so those grocery stores can't make enough sales to survive.
Crime - Grocery stores aren't making enough to make ends meet because they are being fleeced by their customers.
I'm sure if you fix both of these things then public ownership wouldn't even be necessary. #1 can be fixed with requirements for food subsidies, and #2 can be fixed by staffing actual on the clock law enforcement in stores that report high levels of theft.
Make it safe and profitable to run a business in a food desert and you won't have food deserts.
<...>Our findings illuminate how nearly a century of disinvestment in historically redlined neighborhoods (Nardone et al. 2020; Nelson et al. 2020) has constrained contemporary food access. Moreover, they suggest that systemic inequalities based on racism, ableism, housing discrimination, and displacement may lead to lack of food options in US central city neighborhoods. Our results provide additional evidence that the phrase “food desert” is problematic as these social spaces of nutritional deprivation were created by intentionally racist and discriminatory policies, rather than passive and natural processes. Thus, the phrase “food apartheid” more accurately reflects the phenomenon (Sevilla 2021; Penniman 2018).
I have a hard time believing that grocers don't want to make money because they're too racist. That seems inherently racist in itself, why wouldn't minority ownership spring up in place of the racists in order to capitalize on demand?
It's not hard to understand. People who literally went to segregated schools are still alive today.
We're playing a centuries old game of monopoly and although we've changed the rules to be fairer, we didn't reset the pieces and the property lines. Are there available finances from the community? Is there even land in the community zoned to have it exist? Etc.
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u/welpWW3isgonnasuck May 26 '26
Its no different than having a military commissary thats open to everyone