'Power to communities': Chicago considers city-owned grocery store to address 'food deserts' after giants like Walmart and Whole Foods shutter stores

It’s funny how the solutions for the failures of capitalism often end up looking just like socialism

Food, shelter, water, power shouldn't he for profit.

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.

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.

Hmm... products and services still cost the same but now there are less people in the chain to make a profit.

Sounds like a win-win for me.

Small town in Kentucky did a similar thing with a municipally ran gas station.

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.

Healthy food ftw!

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.

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.

I wonder why stores like Walmart and Whole Foods are shuttering stores. Can't wait for these community run stores to become crime-ridden shitholes from rowdies.

It's totally not the ridiculous crime rates from a minority of the population amirite?

He's going to find our real quick why those stores left in the first place