'Power to communities': Chicago considers city-owned grocery store to address 'food deserts' after giants like Walmart and Whole Foods shutter stores
'Power to communities': Chicago considers city-owned grocery store to address 'food deserts' after giants like Walmart and Whole Foods shutter stores
The mayor’s office says it would be the first major U.S. city to enact such a plan.
The mayor’s office says it would be the first major U.S. city to enact such a plan.
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Main streets with Mom and Pop stores are really nice. It seems like you'd get more soul from than a government store. But I don't know how you would incentive then sufficiently, as it's really tough to run a small storefront when competing with online.
The real problem is that we fucked over main streets 75 years ago with deliberately car-dependent zoning policies and massive subsidies for car infrastructure. Now all we're allowed by law to build are shitty stroads with big-box stores.
Grocery stores are still largely an offline business. Industry sales dropped from 65B during civic peak to 40b after COVID. Also I very much doubt the prime affected by this were going to be paying the 20% markup that it costs to use those services. Finally most of those services are really just white label instacart and the store does not need to invest anything substantial if they wanted to offer those services.
Problem with mom and pop stores is the owners are still operating to maximize profit.
This intrinsically involves giving the least while charging the most. They're going to be screwing everyone over as much as they can, while hiding behind the 'mom and pop' shield.