Joe Gentry

Where have all the neighborhood grocery stores gone?

Gone to large retail chains everyone.

Where have all the large retail chains gone?

Gone to consolidation everyone.

“Food desert” is a term that was coined in 1995 by a task force studying what was then a relatively new phenomenon, when actually food deserts arrived in the late 1980s. The United States Department of Agriculture 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 a mile away in a city.

Growing up on the corner of 11th and Tawas, and in the early ’60s walking to middle school at McPhee at 5th and Lincoln, I would pass three local neighborhood grocers — M&M Market at 9th and Saginaw, Handi-Market at the corner of 8th and Fair, and Sunny-Side Market at the corner of Tuttle and Washington. Robert Haltiner in his book “The Town That Went to War — Alpena, Michigan,” he lists 46 meat and grocery stores in the City of Alpena in 1946. Scanning the list, I recall many of them still serving customers in the 1960s like Hennessey Food Store, Alpena Sharp Freeze, Tony and Chet’s Market, Krueger’s Market, Marine Meat Market, Phil’s Super Market, Jos. Zolnierek’s, Tollson’s Market, and A&P Market. Today you’d be hard-pressed to find a grocery store less than one mile away in the City of Alpena, and if you lived in south Alpena County, you might have to drive 10 miles to get to a grocery store. All the while I passed three such enterprises in a 12-block walk to school.

So, where have all the grocery stores gone and why are there more food deserts today than in 2010 in the midst of the Great Recession? Food deserts are not the consequence of low-income or low-population density … something happened. That something was a specific policy change to not enforce the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936. This law banned price discrimination making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them. It did allow businesses to pass along legitimate savings, i.e., if buying by the truckload rather than the case, 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, the Federal Trade Commission’s staple of enforcement was Robinson-Patman. During these decades, the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores competing for shoppers and there was roughly an equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25% of grocery sales — a statistic that was nearly identical in 1982.

The Robison-Patman Act, in short, appears to have worked as intended throughout the mid-20th century. Then it was abandoned. President Reagan was convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business. And so the government stopped enforcing it.

Walmart was the first to fully understand the implications of this new legal terrain and became notorious for strong-arming suppliers, a strategy that fueled its rapid growth. By 2001, it had become the nation’s largest retailer. Kroger, Safeway, and other supermarket chains followed suit. “Self-consolidation,” such as centralizing purchasing, gave them the ability to fully exploit their power as national buyers. Then came the merger spree — Safeway acquired Vons and Dominick’s, and Kroger absorbed Fred Meyer, Ralphs, Smith’s, and Quality Food Centers.

A massive die-off of independent retailers followed. Price discrimination spread beyond groceries, and affected bookstores, pharmacies, and many other local businesses. From 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers went from 53% to 22%.

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 them hard as their customers could not afford to pay higher prices. Why didn’t large chains fill the void when local stores closed? They didn’t need to. They could count on people to schlep across town or travel extra miles to their main location. An independent grocer that tries to establish itself in a more convenient location will struggle to compete with Walmart on price because suppliers always give the mega-chain a better price. In fact, during the pandemic, when supply-chain disruptions left grocery manufacturers struggling to meet demand, Walmart announced stiff penalties for suppliers who failed to fulfill 98% of its orders. Suppliers shorted independents while Walmart’s shelves were full.

Food deserts won’t be eliminated without the re-employment of the Robinson-Patman Act requiring a level pricing playing field restoring local retailers’ ability to compete.

Hopefully the 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 a much larger decline in self-reliance that has swept across small-town America since the 1980s. A significant tool for reversing the decline is available. Any leader who truly cared about the nation’s left-behind communities would use it.

Joe Gentry is the executive director of the United Way of Northeast Michigan. Reach him at 989-354-2221 or jgentry@unitedwaynemi.org.