The conventional explanation for food deserts—that these places are too poor or too rural to generate enough spending on groceries, or too Black ...

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Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social)

1. The conventional explanation for food deserts—that these places are too poor or too rural to generate enough spending on groceries, or too Black to overcome racist corporate redlining — fail to grapple with a key fact: food deserts didn’t used to exist. My new piece in The Atlantic...

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1/30
@stacy Mitchell

1. The conventional explanation for food deserts—that these places are too poor or too rural to generate enough spending on groceries, or too Black to overcome racist corporate redlining — fail to grapple with a key fact: food deserts didn’t used to exist. My new piece in The Atlantic.

The Great Grocery Squeeze

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@‪Stacy Mitchell‬ ‪@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social‬

2. Poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, but food deserts arrived only in the late 1980s. Prior to that, even the smallest towns and poorest neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store — and often they had several.

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@‪Stacy Mitchell‬ ‪@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social‬

3. The Deanwood neighborhood of D.C. is typical of the trend. In the 1960s, this majority-Black, high-poverty community had more than half a dozen grocery stores — several that were local Black-owned businesses, plus a Safeway. By the 1990s, there were only two. Today there are none.

4/30
@‪Stacy Mitchell‬ ‪@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social‬

4. The same pattern played out in rural America. Up until the 1980s, virtually every small town in North Dakota had a grocery store. Many, in fact, had two or more competing supermarkets. Now nearly half of the state’s rural residents live in a food desert.

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@‪Stacy Mitchell‬ ‪@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social‬

5. This timeline is stark. Yet policymakers & academics working on food deserts have done little to try to explain it. Instead, they keep using subsidies to try to lure supermarkets to underserved places. This hasn’t worked. There are more food deserts now than in 2010.

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@‪Stacy Mitchell‬ ‪@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social‬

6. Food deserts didn’t materialize for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s — the Federal Trade Commission stopped enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, a key antitrust law designed to ensure robust competition in retailing.

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@‪Stacy Mitchell‬ ‪@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social‬

7. Congress passed Robinson-Patman in 1936. At the time, the large grocery chain A&P was rapidly taking over the market—not by outcompeting on service & efficiency, but by using its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it much lower prices than they charged local grocers.

8/30
@‪Stacy Mitchell‬ ‪@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social‬

8. The Robinson-Patman Act outlaws price discrimination. It does allow for legit volume discounts. If it costs less to sell a product by the truckload vs. the case, then suppliers can adjust their prices—so long as every retailer buying a truckload gets the same discount.

9/30
@‪Stacy Mitchell‬ ‪@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social‬

9. For nearly 50 years, the law was enforced. It produced a remarkably competitive grocery industry, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and the market split roughly in half between chains and independents. Local grocers thrived alongside corporations like Kroger and Safeway.

10/30
@‪Stacy Mitchell‬ ‪@stacyfmitchell.bsky.social‬

10. Then the law was abandoned in the 1980s, amid a rollback of antitrust. But while enforcement of other laws was merely weakened, Robinson-Patman was shelved entirely. Its focus on fairness for small businesses was anathema to the dominant thinking about scale & progress.

11/30
@‪fridgealchemist.bsky.social‬ ‪@fridgealchemist.bsky.social‬

The entire first half of this article 'was it Reagan?' was floating in the back of my mind. Surprise surprise, it turns out it was Reagan's fault. Astonishing how many of America's large scale problems can be traced back to one administration.

12/30
@‪Jen‬ ‪@ncjen.bsky.social‬

the ppl saying they will relax after the orange thing has passed, are wrong (for me anyway). Reagan has been dead for decades and I still boil thinking about that SOB.

13/30
@‪Peter Johnson‬ ‪@peterj99.bsky.social‬

Isn’t it amazing how many of our current problems have their roots in Reagan’s disastrous presidency

14/30
@‪Matthew Murphy‬ ‪@mzchem-murphy.bsky.social‬

Two pivotal political figures that led us to the current point are Reagan and Gingrich. One put the investor class ahead of the best interests of the American people. The second turned the Republican Party into a top-down organization designed to enact the wishes of those engorging plutocrats.

15/30
@‪mossygene.bsky.social‬ ‪@mossygene.bsky.social‬

And that toad Bork gave it a veneer of intellectual legitimacy.

16/30
@‪Don’t Go Jason Waterfalls‬ ‪@jtwashin.bsky.social‬

This paragraph is putting a lot of faith in the next administration and its voters.

17/30
@‪PD Star‬ ‪@planningforall.bsky.social‬

I’d be shocked if the Dumpy administration cared a rip about this issue. Why do they care? They might do it for votes but they probably count on their voters not really being aware if they did try to improve the situation.

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@‪Festive Fall Arachnid‬ ‪@dqspider.bsky.social‬

this is what really drives me crazy. they create conditions where people have no choice but to buy terrible food, then the people in charge immediately turn around and shame them for their bad choices

19/30
@‪exgnome.bsky.social‬ ‪@exgnome.bsky.social‬

It’s wild that the executive can just decide to stop enforcing valid laws. It wasn’t repealed, it wasn’t declared unconstitutional, the bureaucrats just decided it doesn’t count anymore.

20/30
@‪Hugh Mann‬ ‪@normalhughmann.bsky.social‬

It is wild and it occurs because Congress gives this power to the executive.

A law can be written like "the govt must attempt to enforce law Y" Or "the govt must use $100 million to attempt to enforce law Y". The latter forces the executive's hand.

-Not a lawyer

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@‪Derf Backderf‬ ‪@derfbackderf.bsky.social‬

Good article. Of course it goes straight back to that grinning pompadoured baboon Reagan. Everything dysfunctional in our system always does.

22/30
@‪SandyPBW‬ ‪@sandypbw.bsky.social‬

And he also worked hand in hand with the heritage foundation.

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@‪David Herron‬ ‪@7genblogger.bsky.social‬

My experience as an American living where I am in Europe is that a dense urban space, with zoning rules allowing small shops to exist in neighborhoods, automatically grows an urban space of mixed commercial/residential with plenty of food shops. It's wonderful to have a bakery 100 yards away.

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@‪E.Karol‬ ‪@evikarol.bsky.social‬

It’s one of the many things I love about Europe!

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@‪web_rant‬ ‪@webrant.bsky.social‬

What happened was the same fascist push in the 1980s to deregulate for monopoly concentration of capital we see now.

Just 4 companies consume 2/3 of all grocery sales. Oligarch owned Walmart alone gobbles up $1 out of every $3 spent at grocery retailers in the US.

<a href="/profile/stacyfmitchell.bsky.social/post/3lcarsrhe2s22" role="link" data-no-underline="1" class="css-1jxf684 r-1loqt21" style="font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(16, 131, 254); line-height: 20px; flex: 1 1 0%; font-family: InterVariable, system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, &quot;Apple Color Emoji&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI Emoji&quot;; font-variant: no-contextual;">bsky.app/profile/stac...</a>

26/30
@‪Bevan Crews Tumblin‬ ‪@thehotelcat.bsky.social‬



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@‪JOI Biden‬ ‪@imacopyouidiot.bsky.social‬

TLDR

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@‪Rhonda‬ ‪@rjdeal.bsky.social‬

When I was a girl in the 70s and 80s, we had a small grocery store in my very rural community. It was small but still had all the essentials. Plus it had a seating area in the back. It was a community gathering place for all the local farmers. When it went under, it was a real blow to the community.

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@‪Karla‬ ‪@k3impact.bsky.social‬

I live in St Petersburg florida. Through the past decade, the few grocery stores that were available in the southern part of the city have closed. There is an entire swath of Southeast St Pete, which is predominantly black, that does not have any access to grocery stores. 1/

30/30
@‪Karla‬ ‪@k3impact.bsky.social‬

2/ The city was courting whole foods. They were originally to relocate into the southern area, or even the downtown area which is lacking in grocery space as well. However, they chose to put Whole Foods next to two other public grocery stores that are literally across the street from each other. 3/

 

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The Great Grocery Squeeze

How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert

www.theatlantic.com

The Great Grocery Squeeze​

How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert

By Stacy Mitchell

Millennium Image / Gallery Stock

December 1, 2024, 7 AM ET

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app.

The concept of the food desert has been around long enough that it feels almost like a fact of nature. Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the general consensus is that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate sufficient spending on groceries, or they can’t overcome a racist pattern of corporate redlining.

But these explanations fail to contend with a key fact: Although poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, food deserts arrived only around the late 1980s. Prior to that, small towns and poor neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store, perhaps even several. (The term food desert was coined in 1995 by a task force studying what was then a relatively new phenomenon.)

The high-poverty, majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is typical of the trend. In the 1960s, the area had more than half a dozen grocery stores, according to a study by the anthropologist Ashanté Reese. These included a branch of the local District Grocery Stores co-op, a Safeway supermarket, and independent Black-owned businesses such as Tip Top Grocery on Sheriff Road. By the 1990s, however, the number of grocery stores in Deanwood had dwindled to just two, and today the neighborhood has none.

A similar story played out across rural America, following the same timeline. Up until the 1980s, almost every small town in North Dakota had a grocery store. Many, in fact, had two or more competing supermarkets. Now nearly half of North Dakota’s rural residents live in a food desert. (The USDA defines a food desert as a low-income census tract where the nearest grocery store is more than 10 miles away in a rural area or more than one mile away in a city.)

A slew of state and federal programs have tried to address food deserts by providing tax breaks and other subsidies to lure supermarkets to underserved communities. These efforts have failed. More food deserts exist now than in 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession. That’s because the proposed solutions misunderstand the origins of the problem.

Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.

The structure of the grocery industry has been a matter of national concern since the rise of large retail chains in the early 20th century. The largest was A&P, which, by the 1930s, was rapidly supplanting local grocery stores and edging toward market dominance. 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.

Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them. It does, however, allow businesses to pass along legitimate savings. If it truly costs less to sell a product by the truckload rather than by the case, for example, then suppliers can adjust their prices accordingly—just so long as every retailer who buys by the truckload gets the same discount.

For the next four decades, Robinson-Patman was a staple of the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement agenda. From 1952 to 1964, for example, the agency issued 81 formal complaints to block grocery suppliers from giving large supermarket chains better prices on milk, oatmeal, pasta, cookies, and other items than they offered to smaller grocers. Most of these complaints were resolved when suppliers agreed to eliminate the price discrimination. Occasionally a case went to court.

During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway.

With discriminatory pricing outlawed, competition shifted onto other, healthier fronts. National chains scrambled to keep up with independents’ innovations, which included the first modern self-service supermarkets, and later, automatic doors, shopping carts, and loyalty programs. Meanwhile, independents worked to match the chains’ efficiency by forming wholesale cooperatives, which allowed them to buy goods in bulk and operate distribution systems on par with those of Kroger and A&P. A 1965 federal study that tracked grocery prices across multiple cities for a year found that large independent grocers were less than 1 percent more expensive than the big chains. The Robinson-Patman Act, in short, appears to have worked as intended throughout the mid-20th century.

 

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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.

Zephyr Teachout: Why judges let monopolists off the hook

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. By 2001, it had become the nation’s largest grocery retailer. Kroger, Safeway, and other supermarket chains followed suit. They began with a program of “self-consolidation”—centralizing their purchasing, which had previously been handled by regional divisions, to fully exploit their power as major national buyers. Then, in the 1990s, they embarked on a merger spree. In just two years, Safeway acquired Vons and Dominick’s, while Fred Meyer absorbed Ralphs, Smith’s, and Quality Food Centers, before being swallowed by Kroger. The suspension of the Robinson-Patman Act had created an imperative to scale up.

A massive die-off of independent retailers followed. Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers, creating a “waterbed effect” that amplified the disparity. Price discrimination spread beyond groceries, hobbling bookstores, pharmacies, and many other local businesses. From 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers shrank from 53 percent to 22 percent.

Christopher Beam: Welcome to pricing hell

If you were to plot the end of Robinson-Patman enforcement and the subsequent restructuring of the retail industry on a timeline, it would closely parallel the emergence and spread of food deserts. Locally owned retail businesses were once a mainstay of working-class and rural communities. Their inability to obtain fair prices beginning in the 1980s hit these retailers especially hard because their customers could least afford to pay more. Those who could travel to cheaper chain stores in other neighborhoods or towns were especially likely to do so. (Food deserts were not, by the way, a consequence of suburbanization and white flight, as some observers have suggested. By 1970, more Americans already lived in suburbs than in cities. Yet, at that point, low-income neighborhoods had more grocery stores per capita than middle-class areas. The relationship didn’t begin to reverse until the 1980s.)

Why didn’t large chains fill the void when local stores closed? They didn’t need to. In the 1960s, if a chain like Safeway wanted to compete for the grocery dollars spent by Deanwood residents, it had to open a store in the neighborhood. But once the independent stores closed, the chains no longer had to invest in low-income areas. They could count on people to schlep across town to their other locations. Today, in fact, many Deanwood residents travel to a Safeway outside the neighborhood to shop. This particular Safeway has had such persistent issues with expired meat and rotting produce that some locals have taken to calling it the “UnSafeway.” Yet, without alternatives, people keep shopping there.

In rural areas, the same dynamic means that Walmart can capture spending across a wide region by locating its supercenters in larger towns, counting on people in smaller places that no longer have grocery stores to drive long distances to shop for food. An independent grocer that tries to establish itself in a more convenient location will struggle to compete with Walmart on price because suppliers, who can’t risk losing Walmart’s business, will always give the mega-chain a better price. Indeed, during the height of the pandemic, when supply-chain disruptions left grocery manufacturers struggling to meet demand, Walmart announced stiff penalties for suppliers who failed to fulfill 98 percent of its orders. Suppliers complied by shorting independent grocers, who scrambled to keep staple products in stock even as Walmart’s shelves were full.

The problem of food deserts will not be solved without the rediscovery of the Robinson-Patman Act. Requiring a level pricing playing field would restore local retailers’ ability to compete. This would provide immediate relief to entrepreneurs who have recently opened grocery stores in food deserts, only to find that their inability to buy on the same terms as Walmart and Dollar General makes survival difficult. With local grocery stores back on the scene in these neighborhoods, chain supermarkets may well return, too, lured by a force far more powerful than tax breaks: competition.

The Biden administration has begun to connect the dots. Alvaro Bedoya, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, has been an outspoken proponent of Robinson-Patman enforcement, and the FTC under Chair Lina Khan is widely expected to file its first such case in the coming months. But Donald Trump’s election casts doubts on the long-term prospects for a Robinson-Patman revival. Although the law has garnered support among some GOP House members, powerful donors are calling for corporate-friendly appointments to the FTC. Hopefully the incoming Trump administration realizes that the rural and working-class voters who propelled him to power are among those most affected by food deserts—and by the broader decline in local self-reliance that has swept across small-town America since the 1980s. A powerful tool for reversing that decline is available. Any leader who truly cared about the nation’s left-behind communities would use it.

 

[Wild self]

This is very important

 

[3rdWorld]

So what do people eat or get their food from?

 

[bnew]

So what do people eat or get their food from?

eat unhealthy fast food and they travel farther to typically pay more.

 

[Geek Nasty]

Weird how deregulation turns things to shyt

 

[010101]

...........*

 

[#BOTHSIDES]

eat unhealthy fast food and they travel farther to typically pay more.

Shouldn’t places with food deserts be just as profitable or pretty profitable in general ? What’s the difference ? Seems like these supermarkets could be subsidized or receive some type of tax credits/incentives? Even then they could accept EBT/WIC vouchers. Yeah idk why hood shops usually have old produce as well

 

[The_Sheff]

Remember this every time these clowns start talking about deregulating things.

 

[acri1]

eat unhealthy fast food and they travel farther to typically pay more.

I remember growing up in Detroit, there were barely any grocery stores in the city limits. Just corner stores and dollar stores.

When it came time to actually buy groceries my parents always went to a Farmer Jack in the nearby suburbs. I think it's gotten better since then but still.

 

[bnew]

Shouldn’t places with food deserts be just as profitable or pretty profitable in general ? What’s the difference ? Seems like these supermarkets could be subsidized or receive some type of tax credits/incentives? Even then they could accept EBT/WIC vouchers. Yeah idk why hood shops usually have old produce as well

they don't need to invest aka spend more money when the customer has no choice but to come all the way to them if they want to food to survive.

 

[Lucky_Lefty]

So what do people eat or get their food from?

I went back home to MS about five months ago. It amazes me how many Dollar General/Family Dollar stores there are but that’s where a lot of folks in the MS Delta get their food and clothing from if they’re not by a decent size and populated town

 

[Spence]

So what do people eat or get their food from?

McDonald’s and dollar General gladly step in to provide cheap “food” so people get hooked on having processed/prepared hot meals but nothing that has any semblance of nutrition in it.

 

[Pull Up the Roots]

I remember growing up in Detroit, there were barely any grocery stores in the city limits. Just corner stores and dollar stores.

When it came time to actually buy groceries my parents always went to a Farmer Jack in the nearby suburbs. I think it's gotten better since then but still.

Damn. I remember my parents doing this too after the closest Farmer Jack closed down in the early 80s. After that, it was either the one in Oak Park across from North Land. Or the A&P in Oak Park. I drive by there sometimes and it's still sitting abandoned. The closest grocery store in the area now is in Ferndale.