8 ms·

A federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert

94 points by zdw 2y ago

Arainach 2y ago
Once again, much of the state of America can be summarized as "this awful experience is a direct result of the Reagan administration, but most people don't realize it".
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I was listening to a podcast that mentioned something today that got worse in the eighties, and one host asked the other to guess the cause. I blurted out "Reagan" as I was listening, and was correct. Alas, I don't remember what specific thing they were discussing.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    This is reminiscent of Uncle Ruckus’ visit to White Heaven in The Boondocks
- secabeen 2y ago
  The GOP is the party that says government doesn't work, and when put into power, they make it so.
- Loughla 2y ago
  The problem is that about half the country still sees him as some sort of hero.
  - tzs 2y ago
    The funny thing about Reagan is if you go onto /r/republican or /r/conservative on Reddit and for any problem today that is similar to one faced under Reagan you suggest the same solution Reagan used (but don't say it was Reagan's solution) you will get promptly banned for posting liberal talking points.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  If only a democrat majority had been elected at any point in the last 40 years that could have fixed this.
  - smeej 2y ago
    The article even makes it sound like the law is still on the books, just not being enforced. Pretty sure enforcing the laws is the responsibility of the executive branch, isn't it? So it's not like any big combined majority action would be necessary, just an executive who said, "We enforce this now." I'd like to think the article left out some important context that I'm now missing, because it'd sure be a weird thing to complain about from a partisan perspective if it could have been solved with the stroke of a pen.
    - relaxing 2y ago
      The article does mention it at the end. The reality is Clinton, Obama, and Biden were all corporate-friendly centrists.
      - mrguyorama 2y ago
        Can you really blame the Democrat party for embracing pro-business liberalism when Reagan's landslide victory, and the house and senate control that came with it demonstrated so clearly that AMERICA wanted a pro-business liberal policy? If Democrats didn't adopt a more pro-business face, would there even be a democrat party anymore? People seem to want democrats to do what FDR did. FDR's democrats held like a 70% control in the Senate! He was able to cow the supreme court because he had a credible threat to actually pack the court, like, according to the actual rules. As long as party majority leader is not a democrat for example, you cannot guarantee any judge actually gets their appointment voted on. Yet young democrats are dissatisfied with democrats "letting" McConnell steal the appointments. Want democrats to do something? You have to give them the power to do so!
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > If only a democrat majority had been elected at any point in the last 40 years that could have fixed this. I think that thinking of it this way shifts the blame unduly; it's not like Republicans as well as Democrats don't bear the blame for continuing harmful policies, just because those policies were instituted by Republicans. As to Democrats, the first Democratic administration that was elected after Reagan did so by running away from many traditional Democratic priorities, and both other Democratic administrations had to deal with a recalcitrant Congress for at least a substantial portion of their time in office. Even if they hadn't, though, I think that the general fact is that it's much easier to create problems quickly than to fix them quickly, so that the idea that any administration, even a 2-term one with a hypothetical cooperative Congress, could undo such changes (as opposed to just starting to undo them) isn't plausible—or, if it could be done, then it would surely be as all-consuming of political capital as the ACA was, at the expense of pursuing any of that administration's other priorities—and being able to pursue a longer-term solution would require electoral patience with political promises that weren't accompanied by immediate delivery.
- legitster 2y ago
  This is an intellectually lazy argument. The 1980s was a huge inflection point for our economy overall. It was the beginning of the baby boom. The end of Bretton Woods was just being felt. Instantaneous international markets were a thing for the first time. You can pull as many threads as you want to make the case that it all points to the minutia of a single administration - but they just happened to be at the wheel when the tide was changing.
  - lapcat 2y ago
    > It was the beginning of the baby boom. Which baby boom are you talking about?
    - legitster 2y ago
      Sorry, the introduction of the baby boomers into the economy. The baby boom was 50s and 60s, so late 80s is when they started working and consuming things.
      - lapcat 2y ago
        No, you're a bit off here. The Baby Boom started in the mid 40s, so Boomers started working and consuming things in the 70s. In the late 80s, GenX were reaching adulthood.
hello_computer 2y ago
[flagged]
yyuugg 2y ago
[flagged]
- llm_trw 2y ago
  At some point you have to blame the other people who kept it going for 50 years now.
  - brendoelfrendo 2y ago
    I think this is true, and is a big failing on the part of Democrats to seize an opportunity to do something that would have been generally popular. I think it's funny that the modern Democratic party bends over backwards to please corporate interests, when those corporations are far more interested in Republican politicians. The recent crop of anti-trust investigations has been encouraging, but smacks of a "too little, too late" change of course, especially when this article notes that there is a law on the books (and it is still on the books, despite over forty years of non-enforcement) that could have helped Democrats campaign on food prices, which were a huge concern for voters this year. It's probably Clinton's fault (Bill's, not Hillary's) for shifting the party further to the center to win in the 90s.
  - yyuugg 2y ago
    Oh believe me, I do. The democrats are absolutely complicit. But noting Reagan as an inflection point is also important because it humanizes the span of time. It was not "always like this". It happened because of one admin. It can be undone, we just don't care to, apparently.
asdasdsddd 2y ago
> Today, in fact, many Deanwood residents travel to a Safeway outside the neighborhood to shop. Isn't this the real issue? That we build on the assumption that everyone has a car?
- haroldp 2y ago
  Of course. Or to put it another way, since we are already forced to have cars to get by within the current organization of cities, consumers recognize that they can save considerable money by going to a big consolidated store instead of a small local one.
- TimK65 2y ago
  Or the assumption that these people are traveling by car? That's by no means necessarily true; DC has pretty good public transportation, and there is even a Metro station in Deanwood.
idunnoman1222 2y ago
Maybe big businesses and economy of scale did help the American consumer, have you checked in on the eurozone lately? Has the Chicago school of economics been repudiated? It certainly has its faults but so did antitrust regulations from the 50’s
Uvix 2y ago
One thing the article doesn't explain well: why aren't any of the other chains competing with the UnSafeway near Deanwood? Even if it doesn't make sense for the chains to open a store in Deanwood proper, why aren't they competing where all the traffic is going?
somethoughts 2y ago
Its kind of interesting if Walmart and/or Costco has squeezed prices so low that you could potentially use it as the basis for informal neighborhood bulk buying co-op. Like an Uber app which coordinated grocery buying and splitting up bulk packaged foods into smaller purchase sizes.
- asdasdsddd 2y ago
  I believe that's a thing for alibaba already
  - somethoughts 2y ago
    I don't think alibaba handles grocery as far as I know - at least in the US. Probably it is most similar to Instacart/Amazon Grocery delivery but the issue with these is that they are more oriented toward high value, high convenience, high immediacy, highly customizable orders for groceries items. The flip side would be a set time (i.e. Saturday or Sunday), a set location (i.e. local school parking lot), a set number of bulk items (i.e. eggs, bread, pasta, chicken legs, ground beef, milk).
    - mangolychee 2y ago
      Might be thinking of pinduoduo
- BJones12 2y ago
  Here's an example of that - https://thehustle.co/the-man-feeding-a-remote-alaska-town-with-a-costco-card-and-a-ship https://thehustle.co/the-man-feeding-a-remote-alaska-town-wi...
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  There's still a pretty hefty difference between retail and wholesale. Call around your local distributors and ask if they'll work with a food buyers club.
cogman10 2y ago
Reagan, Clinton, and Bush Jr are the 3 presidents that have obliterated the working class. Unrestrained capitalism creates monopolies and those 3 presidents created an environment for monopolies to flourish. Reagan started things off by deregulating businesses and rewarding big business for "efficiency". Which really just translated into big businesses buying out the competition and jacking up the prices. Clinton continued a trend primarily by dismantling and privatizing the federal government. That lead to giant Quazi-government businesses that have little to no competition and ultimately bring the worst of all worlds. The rollout of the ACA marketplaces is a prime example of what that capture looks like, a sub sub sub sub sub contracted and ultimately outsourced project that was riddled with bugs costing millions to create when literally if the fed gov had a team of software devs employed (perhaps some of the devs from the DOD?) it would have cost far less and would have actually worked. Bush then caused a crisis in funding by dishing out huge tax cuts. Those tax cuts (especially around capital gains) essentially encouraged the hording of wealth while simultaneously with Clinton's privatization of social programs caused a crisis in the federal budget. Couple that with 2 giant boondoggle wars where we effectively dumped trillions of dollars into defense companies to later abandon our purchases in the desert. Defense companies, I might add, that shouldn't exist as their only client is the US government. Why should we be funding 4 or 5 companies to build weapons for the US military? Why can't the US military build its own weapons? Why should we be purchasing wasted tanks with generals literally begging the US government to stop buying equipment? I would much rather that money go to something like UBI, food stamps, or SS/Medicare instead of being the most inefficient way to make jobs. Heck, we could dump that money into free public education and R&D to make sure we aren't falling behind technically without producing weapons that will sit unused.
- dhaugshs 2y ago
  [dead]
- tzs 2y ago
  > The rollout of the ACA marketplaces is a prime example of what that capture looks like, a sub sub sub sub sub contracted and ultimately outsourced project that was riddled with bugs costing millions to create when literally if the fed gov had a team of software devs employed (perhaps some of the devs from the DOD?) it would have cost far less and would have actually worked. You are probably overlooking a lot of complexity in the ACA marketplace software. It needed to exchange information with a bunch of different state systems and the systems of several different federal agencies, and most of those systems had not been designed to exchange information with systems outside of their state or agency.
shadowtree 2y ago
Consumers vote with their wallets that they prefer the big box stores. Reagan removed bargaining restrictions on big box stores, which lowered prices. Bad or good for consumers? Does it matter if you need to drive 8 or 11 miles (non-desert vs. desert) to buy boxed cereals and processed food? CostCo rides the same dynamic, at scale. CostCo deserts? Want to fix it, HN-style? Create a startup! But more regulation? Ffs.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  You’re being super disingenuous if you’re comparing it between 8 and 11 miles.
  - shadowtree 2y ago
    The cut off in the article is at the 10 mile radius for rural areas. 9.9 miles ...not a food desert.
- Tempest1981 2y ago
  > Create a startup! A startup that delivers groceries? Interesting idea...
- cjf101 2y ago
  Not sure where you get 8 miles vs 11 miles (maybe the definition of a rural food desert?). > Low access is characterized by at least 500 people and/or 33 percent of the tract population residing more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery in urban areas, and more than 10 miles in rural areas (source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45014/30940_err140.pdf https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45014/30940_er... ) Interestingly enough, this is measured by the euclidian distance, not by the actual number of miles required to travel.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Regulation is what is needed nevertheless
- JohnBooty 2y ago
haroldp 2y ago
Isn't this a roundabout way of saying that, absent government coercion, consumer preference tends to be towards buying cheaper groceries at a big consolidated store a drive away, than a more expensive nearby store? Isn't the real boogieman here rules (zoning, parking requirements, etc) and subsidies (oil industry) than mean we all live in diffuse single-use residential communities and have to have cars to get to work/school/shop, whether we really want them or not?
- lapcat 2y ago
  > Isn't this a roundabout way of saying that, absent government coercion, consumer preference tends to be towards buying cheaper groceries at a big consolidated store a drive away, than a more expensive nearby store? This seems to be missing the point, which has nothing to do with consumer preference. When Robinson-Patman was enforced, suppliers had to offer the same deal to all grocers, so prices were the same at the nearby stores. When it was no longer enforced, the big chains used their market power to extract special deals from suppliers, and thus, "Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers"
  - legitster 2y ago
    > When it was no longer enforced, the big chains used their market power to extract special deals from suppliers, and thus Sentences like this make me realize nobody writing about these problems has any actual experience in the grocery industry. Grocery store margins are insanely thin. The relationship you have is backwards - suppliers and distributors have insane leverage over grocery stores. Massive brands essentially lease the aisle space from the stores. And stores have to stock the products consumers want because if they can't find the soda they like, they might never shop at that store again. The only leverage grocery stores offer is volume pricing. Frito Lay would much rather move a truckload of product a day through a Safeway than drive around and stock tiny bodegas.
    - lapcat 2y ago
      > suppliers and distributors have insane leverage over grocery stores. > The only leverage grocery stores offer is volume pricing. This is directly contradicted by the article: "Congressional hearings and a federal investigation found that A&P possessed an advantage that had nothing to do with greater efficiency, better service, or other legitimate ways of competing. Instead, A&P used its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it preferential treatment over smaller retailers. Fearful of losing their biggest customer, food manufacturers had no choice but to sell to A&P at substantially lower prices than they charged independent grocers—allowing A&P to further entrench its dominance." "That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. It soon became notorious for aggressively strong-arming suppliers, a strategy that fueled its rapid expansion."
legitster 2y ago
> Prior to that, small towns and poor neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store, perhaps even several. The small, corner grocery store back in the day didn't have much selection though. Hence the takeover of super-markets. For better and worse, their role has mostly been supplanted by gas stations and dollar stores which still populate a lot of these food deserts.
- lapcat 2y ago
  > Hence the takeover of super-markets. How did you read the article and come to that conclusion? Small towns and poor neighborhoods all had grocery stores, and competed fine with supermarkets, until Robinson-Patman stopped being enforced.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  A "good" dollar store isn't thaaaat much worse price wise than Walmart or a "cheap" grocery store. It's generally slightly worse across the board, but consistently better than the whatever the expensive grocery store is though the selection is way worse. It really peeves me I didn't notice this sooner because I'm usually pretty good at identifying bullshit tropes that are really just the middle class fishing for reasons to feel superior and the idea that the poors are getting screwed at the dollar stores one just flew right by because I never shopped much at a dollar store until one opened near me.
  - acuozzo 2y ago
    Alternatively, this trope (and others?) could be an attempt by the "middle class" to establish some kind of class solidarity given that, in reality, there are only two classes: (1) the working class a.k.a. the have-to-works and (2) the capital class a.k.a. the don't-have-to-works. Further subdivision is only useful in some contexts.
underseacables 2y ago
What about a zoning pair law requiring that before building a grocery store, the company must also build a store in a residential area that lacks one? I think other factors are at play, namely crime, and the perception of crime. South Atlanta is a food desert yet a lot of people live there, people who can afford to buy at Aldi's and Lidl. There is bias but I hesitate to name that bias because I think its a multitude of incorrect thinking.
black6 2y ago
> Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it. I'm going to need more meat than this. Was there a memo that went out detailing that this statutory law will no longer be enforced? Did no succeeding FTC Chair or Attorney General think to pick up the torch?
binary132 2y ago
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised on a startup forum, but it does surprise me how even in $CURRENT_YEAR, people are this motivated to uphold Market Darwinism Truth, in defiance of all the evidence that markets at the scale of the United States are dominated by power.
xnx 2y ago
The nearest Walmart is a 20 minute drive away, but I can get delivery from it and still save money (and time!) over closer grocery options. "Food desert" is a bit of a zombie idea.
neonate 2y ago
https://archive.ph/ASW1i https://archive.ph/ASW1i
fluorinerocket 2y ago
What's crazy to me is how we have all these random unenforced laws on the books. One day things change and they start getting enforced again, now you're a criminal.
- acuozzo 2y ago
  > One day things change and they start getting enforced again, now you're a criminal. This combined with the 13th amendment making slavery legal for prisoners enables the US to grow or shrink its pool of available slave workers using primarily political forces. It additionally empowers politicians with effective judicial power they would otherwise not have. Consider, for instance, Giuliani's use of NYC's antiquated cabaret laws to "clean up" the city.
trod1234 2y ago
This opinion article lacks appropriate backing for the narrative pushed to be compelling, the data they reference is not included or linked, and the article suggests that non-enforcement of antitrust is the driver for food deserts which started around the 1980s with Reagan, when in fact there were an awful lot of issues going on simultaneously in that time period economically speaking. It's usually ill-advised to propose a magic bullet when there are many factors at play in the overall economics. I haven't seen any data suggesting the unenforcement (which has no visibility) was more impactful than the S&L crisis (which happened around the same time). 1973 to 1982 Stagflation raged. 1970s took the USD into fiat currency,early 1980s the collapse of Silver occurred due to bad actors cornering markets, certain banks also started being less responsible with whom they loaned to favoring large corporations over independent businesses, and heavy speculation regardless of risk that culminated in the savings and loan crisis affecting many industries, and seemingly following the all too familiar pattern of too-big-to-fail bailout type plans, which were proven to be profitable starting with the Pennsylvania Railroad bankruptcy in 1970 (from what I've seen). While it is an interesting synopsis, the article completely ignores the other factors instead cherrypicking antitrust, more specifically the Patman Act and unenforcement as the culprit. Economies don't operate in a vacuum. Occam's razor says its more likely to be any number of the crises that happened with the underlying trend being fiat banking, than any other factor that has almost no visibility with a lot of other confounding data. They were chaotic times.
naming_the_user 2y ago
The term "food desert" has always seemed needlessly provocative to me. Growing up in the UK my family used to drive 15-20 mins to the supermarket and do a big weekly or monthly shop. The nearest _decent_ non-petrol-station style shop with actual food would have been an hours' walk. In the US unless you actually live in the absolute middle of nowhere like rural rural you're not more than 20 miles from a supermarket. Map example - everywhere other than the darkest red colour is a 15-20 min drive: https://imgur.com/distance-to-nearest-large-supermarket-usa-3300-2550-n8pcD6h https://imgur.com/distance-to-nearest-large-supermarket-usa-... Basically almost anywhere that has any meaningful population at all you're sub 20 mins drive. Of course there's not much in rural areas, that's what rural means. There seems to be a focus on whether you "need" a car which has always seemed silly to me. If you don't have a car in the USA, outside of somewhere like NYC or specific metro corridors, you are going to have a significantly limited life in so many ways that having to drive to the supermarket just seems like a triviality in comparison. Even in Britain people just like, have cars, it's normal, if you don't then outside of London it's just kind of embarrassing. The whole thing seems like someone just wants an excuse to be provocative, just like, go to the supermarket, it's not that deep.
- sdevoid 2y ago
  What is necessarily provocative about the term? Both the noun and verb forms of the word "desert" fit well here, especially in the context of the history that this article talks about. "If you don't have a car ... you are going to have a significantly limited life in so many ways that having to drive to the supermarket just seems like a triviality in comparison." Except that everyone needs to eat, and we know that a poor diet can lead to many, many bad health outcomes. You're correct that there are other disadvantages, such as access to employment opportunities. But if you didn't live in a food desert, you could get a job at the grocery store, right? "people just like, have cars, it's normal" Except that owning (or leasing) a car is a significant, ongoing expense. I barely use mine (<1,000 miles per year) and it still costs me $2k in insurance, registration, and maintenance. Some people just can't afford that. And what if you are young, old, or are unable to drive for any reason?
  - 2y ago
mannyv 2y ago
Private companies could sue under the act. There are associations of small grocers that could have sued and didn't. I wonder if enterprise pricing by software vendors and negotiated pricing between payers and providers violate the act.

94 points by zdw 2y ago

Once again, much of the state of America can be summarized as "this awful experience is a direct result of the Reagan administration, but most people don't realize it".

pavel_lishin 2y ago
I was listening to a podcast that mentioned something today that got worse in the eighties, and one host asked the other to guess the cause. I blurted out "Reagan" as I was listening, and was correct. Alas, I don't remember what specific thing they were discussing.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  This is reminiscent of Uncle Ruckus’ visit to White Heaven in The Boondocks
secabeen 2y ago
The GOP is the party that says government doesn't work, and when put into power, they make it so.
Loughla 2y ago
The problem is that about half the country still sees him as some sort of hero.
- tzs 2y ago
  The funny thing about Reagan is if you go onto /r/republican or /r/conservative on Reddit and for any problem today that is similar to one faced under Reagan you suggest the same solution Reagan used (but don't say it was Reagan's solution) you will get promptly banned for posting liberal talking points.
llm_trw 2y ago
If only a democrat majority had been elected at any point in the last 40 years that could have fixed this.
- smeej 2y ago
  The article even makes it sound like the law is still on the books, just not being enforced. Pretty sure enforcing the laws is the responsibility of the executive branch, isn't it? So it's not like any big combined majority action would be necessary, just an executive who said, "We enforce this now." I'd like to think the article left out some important context that I'm now missing, because it'd sure be a weird thing to complain about from a partisan perspective if it could have been solved with the stroke of a pen.
  - relaxing 2y ago
    The article does mention it at the end. The reality is Clinton, Obama, and Biden were all corporate-friendly centrists.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      Can you really blame the Democrat party for embracing pro-business liberalism when Reagan's landslide victory, and the house and senate control that came with it demonstrated so clearly that AMERICA wanted a pro-business liberal policy? If Democrats didn't adopt a more pro-business face, would there even be a democrat party anymore? People seem to want democrats to do what FDR did. FDR's democrats held like a 70% control in the Senate! He was able to cow the supreme court because he had a credible threat to actually pack the court, like, according to the actual rules. As long as party majority leader is not a democrat for example, you cannot guarantee any judge actually gets their appointment voted on. Yet young democrats are dissatisfied with democrats "letting" McConnell steal the appointments. Want democrats to do something? You have to give them the power to do so!
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > If only a democrat majority had been elected at any point in the last 40 years that could have fixed this. I think that thinking of it this way shifts the blame unduly; it's not like Republicans as well as Democrats don't bear the blame for continuing harmful policies, just because those policies were instituted by Republicans. As to Democrats, the first Democratic administration that was elected after Reagan did so by running away from many traditional Democratic priorities, and both other Democratic administrations had to deal with a recalcitrant Congress for at least a substantial portion of their time in office. Even if they hadn't, though, I think that the general fact is that it's much easier to create problems quickly than to fix them quickly, so that the idea that any administration, even a 2-term one with a hypothetical cooperative Congress, could undo such changes (as opposed to just starting to undo them) isn't plausible—or, if it could be done, then it would surely be as all-consuming of political capital as the ACA was, at the expense of pursuing any of that administration's other priorities—and being able to pursue a longer-term solution would require electoral patience with political promises that weren't accompanied by immediate delivery.
legitster 2y ago
This is an intellectually lazy argument. The 1980s was a huge inflection point for our economy overall. It was the beginning of the baby boom. The end of Bretton Woods was just being felt. Instantaneous international markets were a thing for the first time. You can pull as many threads as you want to make the case that it all points to the minutia of a single administration - but they just happened to be at the wheel when the tide was changing.
- lapcat 2y ago
  > It was the beginning of the baby boom. Which baby boom are you talking about?
  - legitster 2y ago
    Sorry, the introduction of the baby boomers into the economy. The baby boom was 50s and 60s, so late 80s is when they started working and consuming things.
    - lapcat 2y ago
      No, you're a bit off here. The Baby Boom started in the mid 40s, so Boomers started working and consuming things in the 70s. In the late 80s, GenX were reaching adulthood.

hello_computer 2y ago

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yyuugg 2y ago

[flagged]

llm_trw 2y ago
At some point you have to blame the other people who kept it going for 50 years now.
- brendoelfrendo 2y ago
  I think this is true, and is a big failing on the part of Democrats to seize an opportunity to do something that would have been generally popular. I think it's funny that the modern Democratic party bends over backwards to please corporate interests, when those corporations are far more interested in Republican politicians. The recent crop of anti-trust investigations has been encouraging, but smacks of a "too little, too late" change of course, especially when this article notes that there is a law on the books (and it is still on the books, despite over forty years of non-enforcement) that could have helped Democrats campaign on food prices, which were a huge concern for voters this year. It's probably Clinton's fault (Bill's, not Hillary's) for shifting the party further to the center to win in the 90s.
- yyuugg 2y ago
  Oh believe me, I do. The democrats are absolutely complicit. But noting Reagan as an inflection point is also important because it humanizes the span of time. It was not "always like this". It happened because of one admin. It can be undone, we just don't care to, apparently.

asdasdsddd 2y ago

> Today, in fact, many Deanwood residents travel to a Safeway outside the neighborhood to shop. Isn't this the real issue? That we build on the assumption that everyone has a car?

haroldp 2y ago
Of course. Or to put it another way, since we are already forced to have cars to get by within the current organization of cities, consumers recognize that they can save considerable money by going to a big consolidated store instead of a small local one.
TimK65 2y ago
Or the assumption that these people are traveling by car? That's by no means necessarily true; DC has pretty good public transportation, and there is even a Metro station in Deanwood.

idunnoman1222 2y ago

Maybe big businesses and economy of scale did help the American consumer, have you checked in on the eurozone lately? Has the Chicago school of economics been repudiated? It certainly has its faults but so did antitrust regulations from the 50’s

Uvix 2y ago

One thing the article doesn't explain well: why aren't any of the other chains competing with the UnSafeway near Deanwood? Even if it doesn't make sense for the chains to open a store in Deanwood proper, why aren't they competing where all the traffic is going?

somethoughts 2y ago

Its kind of interesting if Walmart and/or Costco has squeezed prices so low that you could potentially use it as the basis for informal neighborhood bulk buying co-op. Like an Uber app which coordinated grocery buying and splitting up bulk packaged foods into smaller purchase sizes.

asdasdsddd 2y ago
I believe that's a thing for alibaba already
- somethoughts 2y ago
  I don't think alibaba handles grocery as far as I know - at least in the US. Probably it is most similar to Instacart/Amazon Grocery delivery but the issue with these is that they are more oriented toward high value, high convenience, high immediacy, highly customizable orders for groceries items. The flip side would be a set time (i.e. Saturday or Sunday), a set location (i.e. local school parking lot), a set number of bulk items (i.e. eggs, bread, pasta, chicken legs, ground beef, milk).
  - mangolychee 2y ago
    Might be thinking of pinduoduo
BJones12 2y ago
Here's an example of that - https://thehustle.co/the-man-feeding-a-remote-alaska-town-with-a-costco-card-and-a-ship https://thehustle.co/the-man-feeding-a-remote-alaska-town-wi...
KennyBlanken 2y ago
There's still a pretty hefty difference between retail and wholesale. Call around your local distributors and ask if they'll work with a food buyers club.

cogman10 2y ago

Reagan, Clinton, and Bush Jr are the 3 presidents that have obliterated the working class. Unrestrained capitalism creates monopolies and those 3 presidents created an environment for monopolies to flourish. Reagan started things off by deregulating businesses and rewarding big business for "efficiency". Which really just translated into big businesses buying out the competition and jacking up the prices. Clinton continued a trend primarily by dismantling and privatizing the federal government. That lead to giant Quazi-government businesses that have little to no competition and ultimately bring the worst of all worlds. The rollout of the ACA marketplaces is a prime example of what that capture looks like, a sub sub sub sub sub contracted and ultimately outsourced project that was riddled with bugs costing millions to create when literally if the fed gov had a team of software devs employed (perhaps some of the devs from the DOD?) it would have cost far less and would have actually worked. Bush then caused a crisis in funding by dishing out huge tax cuts. Those tax cuts (especially around capital gains) essentially encouraged the hording of wealth while simultaneously with Clinton's privatization of social programs caused a crisis in the federal budget. Couple that with 2 giant boondoggle wars where we effectively dumped trillions of dollars into defense companies to later abandon our purchases in the desert. Defense companies, I might add, that shouldn't exist as their only client is the US government. Why should we be funding 4 or 5 companies to build weapons for the US military? Why can't the US military build its own weapons? Why should we be purchasing wasted tanks with generals literally begging the US government to stop buying equipment? I would much rather that money go to something like UBI, food stamps, or SS/Medicare instead of being the most inefficient way to make jobs. Heck, we could dump that money into free public education and R&D to make sure we aren't falling behind technically without producing weapons that will sit unused.

dhaugshs 2y ago
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tzs 2y ago
> The rollout of the ACA marketplaces is a prime example of what that capture looks like, a sub sub sub sub sub contracted and ultimately outsourced project that was riddled with bugs costing millions to create when literally if the fed gov had a team of software devs employed (perhaps some of the devs from the DOD?) it would have cost far less and would have actually worked. You are probably overlooking a lot of complexity in the ACA marketplace software. It needed to exchange information with a bunch of different state systems and the systems of several different federal agencies, and most of those systems had not been designed to exchange information with systems outside of their state or agency.

shadowtree 2y ago

Consumers vote with their wallets that they prefer the big box stores. Reagan removed bargaining restrictions on big box stores, which lowered prices. Bad or good for consumers? Does it matter if you need to drive 8 or 11 miles (non-desert vs. desert) to buy boxed cereals and processed food? CostCo rides the same dynamic, at scale. CostCo deserts? Want to fix it, HN-style? Create a startup! But more regulation? Ffs.

aaomidi 2y ago
You’re being super disingenuous if you’re comparing it between 8 and 11 miles.
- shadowtree 2y ago
  The cut off in the article is at the 10 mile radius for rural areas. 9.9 miles ...not a food desert.
Tempest1981 2y ago
> Create a startup! A startup that delivers groceries? Interesting idea...
cjf101 2y ago
Not sure where you get 8 miles vs 11 miles (maybe the definition of a rural food desert?). > Low access is characterized by at least 500 people and/or 33 percent of the tract population residing more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery in urban areas, and more than 10 miles in rural areas (source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45014/30940_err140.pdf https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45014/30940_er... ) Interestingly enough, this is measured by the euclidian distance, not by the actual number of miles required to travel.
HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
Regulation is what is needed nevertheless
JohnBooty 2y ago

haroldp 2y ago

Isn't this a roundabout way of saying that, absent government coercion, consumer preference tends to be towards buying cheaper groceries at a big consolidated store a drive away, than a more expensive nearby store? Isn't the real boogieman here rules (zoning, parking requirements, etc) and subsidies (oil industry) than mean we all live in diffuse single-use residential communities and have to have cars to get to work/school/shop, whether we really want them or not?

lapcat 2y ago
> Isn't this a roundabout way of saying that, absent government coercion, consumer preference tends to be towards buying cheaper groceries at a big consolidated store a drive away, than a more expensive nearby store? This seems to be missing the point, which has nothing to do with consumer preference. When Robinson-Patman was enforced, suppliers had to offer the same deal to all grocers, so prices were the same at the nearby stores. When it was no longer enforced, the big chains used their market power to extract special deals from suppliers, and thus, "Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers"
- legitster 2y ago
  > When it was no longer enforced, the big chains used their market power to extract special deals from suppliers, and thus Sentences like this make me realize nobody writing about these problems has any actual experience in the grocery industry. Grocery store margins are insanely thin. The relationship you have is backwards - suppliers and distributors have insane leverage over grocery stores. Massive brands essentially lease the aisle space from the stores. And stores have to stock the products consumers want because if they can't find the soda they like, they might never shop at that store again. The only leverage grocery stores offer is volume pricing. Frito Lay would much rather move a truckload of product a day through a Safeway than drive around and stock tiny bodegas.
  - lapcat 2y ago
    > suppliers and distributors have insane leverage over grocery stores. > The only leverage grocery stores offer is volume pricing. This is directly contradicted by the article: "Congressional hearings and a federal investigation found that A&P possessed an advantage that had nothing to do with greater efficiency, better service, or other legitimate ways of competing. Instead, A&P used its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it preferential treatment over smaller retailers. Fearful of losing their biggest customer, food manufacturers had no choice but to sell to A&P at substantially lower prices than they charged independent grocers—allowing A&P to further entrench its dominance." "That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. It soon became notorious for aggressively strong-arming suppliers, a strategy that fueled its rapid expansion."

legitster 2y ago

> Prior to that, small towns and poor neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store, perhaps even several. The small, corner grocery store back in the day didn't have much selection though. Hence the takeover of super-markets. For better and worse, their role has mostly been supplanted by gas stations and dollar stores which still populate a lot of these food deserts.

lapcat 2y ago
> Hence the takeover of super-markets. How did you read the article and come to that conclusion? Small towns and poor neighborhoods all had grocery stores, and competed fine with supermarkets, until Robinson-Patman stopped being enforced.
potato3732842 2y ago
A "good" dollar store isn't thaaaat much worse price wise than Walmart or a "cheap" grocery store. It's generally slightly worse across the board, but consistently better than the whatever the expensive grocery store is though the selection is way worse. It really peeves me I didn't notice this sooner because I'm usually pretty good at identifying bullshit tropes that are really just the middle class fishing for reasons to feel superior and the idea that the poors are getting screwed at the dollar stores one just flew right by because I never shopped much at a dollar store until one opened near me.
- acuozzo 2y ago
  Alternatively, this trope (and others?) could be an attempt by the "middle class" to establish some kind of class solidarity given that, in reality, there are only two classes: (1) the working class a.k.a. the have-to-works and (2) the capital class a.k.a. the don't-have-to-works. Further subdivision is only useful in some contexts.

underseacables 2y ago

What about a zoning pair law requiring that before building a grocery store, the company must also build a store in a residential area that lacks one? I think other factors are at play, namely crime, and the perception of crime. South Atlanta is a food desert yet a lot of people live there, people who can afford to buy at Aldi's and Lidl. There is bias but I hesitate to name that bias because I think its a multitude of incorrect thinking.

black6 2y ago

> Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it. I'm going to need more meat than this. Was there a memo that went out detailing that this statutory law will no longer be enforced? Did no succeeding FTC Chair or Attorney General think to pick up the torch?

binary132 2y ago

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised on a startup forum, but it does surprise me how even in $CURRENT_YEAR, people are this motivated to uphold Market Darwinism Truth, in defiance of all the evidence that markets at the scale of the United States are dominated by power.

xnx 2y ago

The nearest Walmart is a 20 minute drive away, but I can get delivery from it and still save money (and time!) over closer grocery options. "Food desert" is a bit of a zombie idea.

neonate 2y ago

https://archive.ph/ASW1i https://archive.ph/ASW1i

fluorinerocket 2y ago

What's crazy to me is how we have all these random unenforced laws on the books. One day things change and they start getting enforced again, now you're a criminal.

acuozzo 2y ago
> One day things change and they start getting enforced again, now you're a criminal. This combined with the 13th amendment making slavery legal for prisoners enables the US to grow or shrink its pool of available slave workers using primarily political forces. It additionally empowers politicians with effective judicial power they would otherwise not have. Consider, for instance, Giuliani's use of NYC's antiquated cabaret laws to "clean up" the city.

trod1234 2y ago

This opinion article lacks appropriate backing for the narrative pushed to be compelling, the data they reference is not included or linked, and the article suggests that non-enforcement of antitrust is the driver for food deserts which started around the 1980s with Reagan, when in fact there were an awful lot of issues going on simultaneously in that time period economically speaking. It's usually ill-advised to propose a magic bullet when there are many factors at play in the overall economics. I haven't seen any data suggesting the unenforcement (which has no visibility) was more impactful than the S&L crisis (which happened around the same time). 1973 to 1982 Stagflation raged. 1970s took the USD into fiat currency,early 1980s the collapse of Silver occurred due to bad actors cornering markets, certain banks also started being less responsible with whom they loaned to favoring large corporations over independent businesses, and heavy speculation regardless of risk that culminated in the savings and loan crisis affecting many industries, and seemingly following the all too familiar pattern of too-big-to-fail bailout type plans, which were proven to be profitable starting with the Pennsylvania Railroad bankruptcy in 1970 (from what I've seen). While it is an interesting synopsis, the article completely ignores the other factors instead cherrypicking antitrust, more specifically the Patman Act and unenforcement as the culprit. Economies don't operate in a vacuum. Occam's razor says its more likely to be any number of the crises that happened with the underlying trend being fiat banking, than any other factor that has almost no visibility with a lot of other confounding data. They were chaotic times.

naming_the_user 2y ago

The term "food desert" has always seemed needlessly provocative to me. Growing up in the UK my family used to drive 15-20 mins to the supermarket and do a big weekly or monthly shop. The nearest _decent_ non-petrol-station style shop with actual food would have been an hours' walk. In the US unless you actually live in the absolute middle of nowhere like rural rural you're not more than 20 miles from a supermarket. Map example - everywhere other than the darkest red colour is a 15-20 min drive: https://imgur.com/distance-to-nearest-large-supermarket-usa-3300-2550-n8pcD6h https://imgur.com/distance-to-nearest-large-supermarket-usa-... Basically almost anywhere that has any meaningful population at all you're sub 20 mins drive. Of course there's not much in rural areas, that's what rural means. There seems to be a focus on whether you "need" a car which has always seemed silly to me. If you don't have a car in the USA, outside of somewhere like NYC or specific metro corridors, you are going to have a significantly limited life in so many ways that having to drive to the supermarket just seems like a triviality in comparison. Even in Britain people just like, have cars, it's normal, if you don't then outside of London it's just kind of embarrassing. The whole thing seems like someone just wants an excuse to be provocative, just like, go to the supermarket, it's not that deep.

sdevoid 2y ago
What is necessarily provocative about the term? Both the noun and verb forms of the word "desert" fit well here, especially in the context of the history that this article talks about. "If you don't have a car ... you are going to have a significantly limited life in so many ways that having to drive to the supermarket just seems like a triviality in comparison." Except that everyone needs to eat, and we know that a poor diet can lead to many, many bad health outcomes. You're correct that there are other disadvantages, such as access to employment opportunities. But if you didn't live in a food desert, you could get a job at the grocery store, right? "people just like, have cars, it's normal" Except that owning (or leasing) a car is a significant, ongoing expense. I barely use mine (<1,000 miles per year) and it still costs me $2k in insurance, registration, and maintenance. Some people just can't afford that. And what if you are young, old, or are unable to drive for any reason?
- 2y ago

mannyv 2y ago

Private companies could sue under the act. There are associations of small grocers that could have sued and didn't. I wonder if enterprise pricing by software vendors and negotiated pricing between payers and providers violate the act.