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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26178 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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An article just came out about the government supported grocery store in Kansas: https://archive.is/lNlvD . But the store is currently a total disaster:

Taylor, 68, has supported the KC Sun Fresh since it opened just blocks from her home. But that solitary tomato was almost too much to bear.

Sales were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet. Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020. Shoplifting cases have nearly tripled.

KC Sun Fresh lost $885,000 last year and now has only about 4,000 shoppers a week. That’s down from 14,000 a few years ago, according to Emmet Pierson Jr., who leads Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city. Despite a recent $750,000 cash infusion from the city, the shelves are almost bare.

This seems to be a hit piece targeting the NYC mayor favorite Zhoran who wants to bring government run grocery stores to NYC

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, has attracted attention for his campaign pledge to combat “out-of-control” prices by establishing five city-owned supermarkets that he says will pass savings onto customers by operating “without a profit motive.”

But it's unclear whether the failure of the store is due to mismanagement or criminals establishing a base nearby:

Part of the problem is the city’s lack of a jail, Young said. The left-leaning council closed the previous facility in 2009 as a cost-saving measure — a move the Kansas City Star has called a “$250 million mistake” — people arrested for minor crimes are quickly released instead of being held in rural counties miles away. That allows them to hop on the local bus system — free since the pandemic — and head back to the same location, Young said. “We typically have the same group of offenders every week that are recognizable by face and by name, just loitering and hanging out,” he said. “A small percentage of people are ruining it for the rest of the community that deserves to go to their grocery store and their library.”

It also may simply be that there are too many grocery stores for that area:

Data bears out both points. A USDA analysis showed the area around the store is low income but not low access. And a Washington Post analysis of the adjacent Zip codes show the area has steadily lost population since 2020. The council member who represents the area, Melissa Patterson Hazley, estimates there are more than 200 vacant lots in her district.

... the neighborhood has other options because of a nearby Aldi store and the independent Happy Foods Center.

But there's also more to the story - and a bit of misrepresentation but not outright lie slipped in by the WP reporter. Sun Fresh market isn't government run and never was. Sun Fresh market was actually a successful independent grocery store for over 25 years. The city does own the strip mall itself, and it seems that the store moved to this location in 2018, probably after getting some generous incentives from the city. After the Lipari guy called it quits, this nonprofit got their hands on the store (probably in a move set up by the city itself). But the city doesn't actually run the store.

Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city.

So there are a lot of threads going on with this article, but my take on this is that the store was probably doing okay before 2020, but then Fentanyl Floyd's crime wave absolutely decimated the area. Seeing the situation, the store owner bailed out, but the city, not wanting to see their strip mall project go bust, gave a nonprofit millions in cash to keep the store afloat. On the other hand, it seems that the other stores in the strip mall are doing ok according to google maps, so it could just be that the nonprofit currently running the store is wildly incompetent.

Overall I think there's not enough here to get a good read on what might happen with Zohran, but my bias is still that government incompetence has no bounds. Aldi is less than 1 mile away and they are doing ok according to google. And even though the city isn't running the store directly they are throwing millions into it without figuring out how to get out of the hole.

This has always been the reason for 'food deserts' - not that grocery stores maliciously avoid urban zones, but that they are forced out by crime. The margins on produce are razor thin and cannot handle a significant burden from shoplifting. This is not a symptom of urban areas in general - there are major cities in the US and around the world with perfectly healthy and reasonably priced groceries, I used to live in one - this is caused by bad policy from soft-hearted politicians who don't take crime seriously. Mamdani is a case in point here, not because he wants government-run grocery stores to fix the food desert problem (which in my opinion isn't a totally crazy idea, I've got no problem in theory with government subsidizing or managing a business even though it will likely suffer from red tape and overhead) - he's a case in point because he's openly soft on crime and yet doesn't see the connection to the other problems in his city.

Produce isn't getting stolen. The underclass doesn't want it and doesn't know anyone who does. There's probably a meat theft problem, but the real reason is that the urban poor just doesn't cook and doesn't want to. There are no grocery stores selling fresh ingredients because nobody would buy them; they buy whatever processed foods and sodas/energy drinks their foodstamps cover, but not raw meat, produce, staples like rice or flour or pasta, dairy. The native underclass eats an atrocious diet of ultraprocessed foods with terrible macros and they won't buy anything else.

And you're basing this on what, exactly? Your intimate involvement with the "urban poor"? I can assure you that right now, the patronage of several Pittsburgh grocery stores in wealthy, white areas is close to half black, with jitneys lining the parking lots. These just so happen to be the closest normal grocery stores to "urban areas" without one.

Normal, working and middle class blacks shop at grocery stores and eat normal, burgers and spaghetti and pork chops, food. Most blacks are not the underclass(and the underclass is not entirely black, although it is disproportionately so). Underclass whites don't cook either.

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