Found this thread on Twitter discussing Food Deserts:

Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) posted at 8:19 AM on Sun, Dec 01, 2024:
1. The conventional explanations 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.

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.

3. The Deanwood neighborhood of DC is typical of the trend. In the 1960s, this 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. 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.

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.

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.

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

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. Overnight, the move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers. Walmart was the first to grasp the implications. It soon became notorious for aggressively squeezing suppliers. It grew rapidly.

12. Other supermarket chains followed suit, embarking on a wave of mergers to enhance their power as major buyers. Scale—not efficiency, innovation, service, selection, or anything else—became the main driver of success in retail.

13. No longer able to obtain fair pricing, independent retailers went into a tailspin. From 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers shrank from 53% to 22%. Poor neighborhoods, small towns, and Black communities bore the brunt of the closures

14. But why didn’t large chains fill the void in these communities? 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.

15. But with the local stores gone, the chains no longer had to invest in low-income places. They could count on people to schlep to their other locations. Today, many Deanwood residents travel to a Safeway outside the neighborhood. It’s a bad Safeway too.

16. Big grocery retailers won’t return to the places they’ve abandoned unless they’re compelled by a force far more powerful than tax breaks — competition. If local grocery stores open in these communities, the chains will follow.

17. To do that, we must reactive Robinson-Patman. That would create a revival of local grocers. And it would provide relief to those who have opened in food deserts, only to find that surviving is difficult if they can’t buy on the same terms as Walmart.

18. In the 1980s, policymakers dismissed independent retailers as unimportant. The lesson of food deserts is that they are, in fact, pivotal — a keystone species. When they thrive, it changes the whole ecosystem for the better. Read my piece in The Alantic https://t.co/bTWm0rPJ6e
(https://x.com/stacyfmitchell/status/1863226439799013573?t=nx5cuSmHIObkEzeD78fklg&s=03)

The 1980’s..the Reagan era…why am I not surprised.
Nearly every problem of the last 40+ years can be traced back to him.