About 3% of humans are born psychpaths (roughly: they have no empathy hence only care about themselves).
One would naivelly expect that only caring about yourself would be a winning strategy from a genetics point of view and hence over time the whole of Manking would have become psychopaths as the ones with such a natural advantage were more successful at surviving and reproducing than the others, yet that's not at all the case and only a small fraction of people are born psychopaths.
My personal explanation for that is that psychopathic behaviour is only a genetic advantage if most people around are not that - or, transposed to to economic terms, being a rent-seeker only works if most people are producers and doens't at all work when most people are rent-seekers.
I expect that in our evolutionary past, whenever a tribe/group had too many psychopaths without some kind of mechanism to kick them out or force them into cooperative mode, it eventually collapsed and ended up removed from the genetic pool hence why in millions of years of evolution the supposed superior behaviour of caring only about yourself didn't end up dominating the human genetic pool - the "threading of the needle" for the survival psychopathy as a behavioural trait in the gene pool was a balance between that behaviour expressing itself often enough to reproduce and remain in the gene pool and not so much that there were too many such individuals in a group causing it to collapse.
It's sad seeing all the idiots excited to go to the proprietary platforms. I feel like they're victims of viral marketing, similar to how red bull operates.
Not necessarily. That would turn it into something more like a public utility than like a for-profit business.
I mean, it's "not socialism" when the fire department or the power utility aren't private, for-profit corporations, but it is if the grocery store is? LOL
This is why I try to avoid using words like socialism and communism. Everyone has their own ideas of what they mean, and most of them aren't exactly wrong because these are broad terms with different sects. So many times a person mentions either word, and then guys like you come out of the woodwork to be like "umm, actually..." Lol.
I prefer to focus on real solutions to real problems (pragmatism.) This is a very pragmatic approach to solving the issue of corporations not meeting standards.
You're right. They should tax 100% of my income and give me a weekly grocery credit!
Oh, and it won't be enough to buy a nice steak more than once a week. Even though I have a very prestigious position at my job, I'm given the same grocery allowance as everyone else
The stores left because of the crime, not because there isn't a market for them. I'm sure there are tons of people in Chicago who would love shopping at a local grocery store.
It's not sustainable to run a business when your loss to crimes outweighs any potential profits
The crime stories (yep, they made a big buzz and media ran hundreds of stories about that one shoplifter in San Francisco) wildly overstated the actual amount of crime. It's just so interesting that corporate news oversold that story, so much so that a person that didn't know better would think that was a pervasive thing in urban areas and cities are all hellscapes of disorder and flames.
Meanwhile, shareholders rewarded Walgreens' management with a boost to stock prices after they reported they'd be pulling out of 'crime-ridden' areas. They didn't leave because of the crime, they left for the stock bump and told the crime story to make it look less-bad
There are less than 6500 food deserts in the country. Having access to cheap healthy food is available to the vast majority of people living in the US. We're talking edge cases, capitalism has been quite successful with the food supply chain here.
Do you think 6500 is a low number? It's not like each food desert affects only one person each. More likely than not, each is affecting more than a thousand people. Especially in a population dense area like Chicago. We are talking millions of people living in food deserts.
Also, after reading a bunch of your comments, I'm not sure you are fully aware of what a food desert is. But hey, that's Capitalism.
I agree. I don’t think people realise how many “food deserts” there were even a hundred years ago, let alone further back. They certainly don’t realise how many food deserts there are in countries which don’t practise capitalism, or have not in the past.
I'll toss in that I'm fine with the luxurious versions of those things being for profit where it applies. But that's the rub, the ruling class is probably going to define anything past a cardboard box and gruel as "luxury."
Since the pandemic I've been working from home and that gives me time to take food-shopping off of my wife's share of the household work. I noticed pretty quickly that every supermarket under the Kroger group was gouging on prices, so when they acquired Safeway I discovered there's a WinCo in my town. (WinCo is employee owned, has the feel of a warehouse/bulk store, and it beats Kroger/Walmart/Amazon/GoodFoodHoldings stores on price, by a lot. Plus, the employees don't have the energy of beaten animals and that matters to me for some reason.)
Good on Chicago doing this but there are already alternatives to Walmart and Whole Foods in some places if you look.
WinCo is legit. The bulk section alone makes going in there worth it. Need oregano? You can pay $5.99 for the jar at Kroger (in my area, Fred Meyer) or you can go to the bulk section of WinCo and pay $0.37.*
* Numbers not exact, but it is literally that drastic a difference.
Yeah. I got a bunch of resealable/airtight bulk containers and will probably never buy spices in those little 2oz shaker-jars again. My pantry is a small store by itself now, it feels better to get like a pound of a spice for $7 than it does to buy 2 ounces at a time for $7- and all those trips I don't have to make to get a spice I just ran out of is totally worth it- my restocking trip is... from kitchen to pantry, takes seconds.
Eh, where I live the employee-owned grocery store is of lower quality and higher priced than Walmart.
I went in expecting more, was sorely disappointed and left without buying anything.
It's essentially the same products in a worse store for a higher price.
I know a lot of people like to beat the 'employee-owned' drum, but unless that translates to lower prices or better quality, I don't see a reason for customers to subscribe to it.
I agree. At the end of the day it's a business. But if two companies offer similar products go with the employee owned company.
The main thing about is decision making structure. Because employee or community owned stores are owned by the users. It means the end users have power over what is offered. As opposed to big box in which case it is non local non user shareholders.
I'm more than positive that food deserted areas could not afford Whole Paycheck and Walmart is never the solution. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If its successful then I forsee this being used in more than just Chicago.
Should just empower a local resident to build a local mom and pop grocery store. Subsidize them so they can compete against the larger chains if you have to, but that's how it used to be done and can still be done. Eventually they probably wouldn't need the subsidies because they're going to focus on what they can sell. They might not have the selection of a big chain, but if they aren't needing to compete with a billion dollar company that operates at a loss to drive them out of business, they'll do ok.
Should just empower a local resident to build a local mom and pop grocery store.
The fundamental cause of every problem in the US always comes down to the zoning code. Every. Single. Time.
You know why those mom and pop grocery stores don't exist? Because in most cases, they're not allowed to because corner stores in residential areas were outlawed 75 years ago. Also, even when they are allowed to exist, the real reason they can't compete is because the zoning code forces car-dependency in a whole bunch of other ways, which (figuratively and literally) drives consolidation into big-box stores with gigantic parking lots.
Why give a private entity money when you can just do it publicly? And in the process not sell only what's profitable rather than what provides good health to residents. The existing mini-marts and what not are selling what's profitable (non-perishable processed food).
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.
paving over huge areas of the earth with concrete and forgetting how to grow your own food creates bad situations.
every community/neighborhood should by law have a green/garden area of a certain size that is capable of growing most of the food required to sustain the local residents.
That's not at all feasible for places with long, cold winters, or southwest areas without enough water, among others.
And before you say "well people shouldn't live there then", they live in those places because of the other resources. For example, let's say logging in Montana, or oil fields in Texas. You're not going to get the world to stop needing those resources any time soon.
and yet people in all of those places manage to grow their own food. humans are a resilient and adaptable species. but anyway, this is a tangent. even if the land has a playground on it, it doesn't matter. people can decide how to use a blank space in a neighborhood. if food grows well there, then grow food. if not, make it a farmers market and people can bring the food there. the point is....we shouldn't pave over the earth and then complain about food deserts.
Those stores left because of crime. Instead of fixing the root cause of major social issues, their Band-Aid is taxpayer funded stores? Why not just skip the middle man and send food to people directly? Or just set up taxpayer funded food banks. That’s effectively what these “stores” will turn into anyway. This just seems like performative nonsense, not intended to solve anything.
Why do you think these examples are analogous? The stores in the towns described in the articles you linked didn’t shut down because of poverty or crime. In the examples you provided, collective supermarkets seem to be a good fit. Contrast this with the Chicago mayor, who cites poverty. If people can’t afford food anyway, and the business is going to face sky high theft, the plan doesn’t make sense. Cut out the middle man and just send poor people food. It would cost far less than trying to set up supermarkets from scratch and running them at a loss in perpetuity. Plus it means helping poor people, rather than forcing them to shop lift if they’re hungry.
For decades now developers have been buying commercial property and shutting down the business. This makes the area less desirable and lowers residential prices
When those are "low enough" developers buy them up
The next step is usually getting tax money to "redevelop" the area and then they'll reopen businesses and sell the residential at a high markup as an "up and coming neighborhood". It's just a money shuffle that hurts the majority of Americans and funnels wealth to the wealthy.
Do you have some examples? IMHO, few shareholders are willing to weather decades of losses like that in the hope that one day their investment pays off. I’m not buying it. No one buys property and then intentionally devalues it.
Wal-mart regularly closes stores that try to unionize.
Whole Foods is a division of Amazon, and their store decisions generally float around hurting labor until labor gets fed up.
But that is only the pattern that both of those employers have shown repeatedly for years now so maybe I am prejudice against companies owned by multibillionaires.