Once again this hypocritical fucktard is blasting a company for making a proper business decision. Kroger does not want to subsidize those stores that are unprofitable.
Open a minority-owned store in the area instead of blasting Kroger. Not everything is racially based.
Meh. Bleaters gotta bleat. I say just ignore him and go on with life.
“Food Deserts” where there is a distinct lack of grocery stores is a real thing. It tends to hit poor, inner city people harder, as they tend to rely on buses and other means of transportation that make regular visits to suburban grocery stores rather difficult.
Besides the whole idea of trying to carry a bags of groceries on a damned bus.
It’s not exactly the most radical thing he’s said, and he’s speaking on the King anniversary of ways to continue to fight back and peacefully demonstrate.
Considering the very real threat of food deserts in our inner cities (IANAE on the area in question), I think it’s justified. Hardly worthy of a STFU request.
I am totally aware of food deserts. I live outside Detroit. A company should not be shamed for closing stores that lose money. The community can do a co-op style store or partner with a distributor such as SpartanNash and open an independent store.
What does any of that have to do with a company only operating stores that are profitable?
I’m not sure what onus should be on companies versus communities and charity and larger levels of government, but I don’t see how Jackson is being hypocritical. Does his organization buy up local grocery stores and shut them down or something?
“I’ll take Internet Message Board Posts from Angry White Dudes for $100, Alex.”
Jesse’s gotta make noise to stay in the spotlight so people don’t notice how irrelevant he actually is.
According to the link in the OP, an outside analysis showed that one of the stores was profitable.
I’m a little skeptical. How would they do such an analysis?
It may be that while the one store was profitable, it is only so because of proximity to the other stores. If the other stores go away, they lose some economy of scale. So, the group is net unprofitable.
I’m going on memory here but hasnt the whole picture of food deserts and their impacts shown to be much more complex? I believe it was shown that it was much more than the lack of access to healthier foods that caused those in poverty to make the food choices they made. It was also culture and habit and other factors. It was found that even when these poverty stricken people WERE given access to healthy foods and full grocery, they made the very same types of food choices as they made before in the food deserts.
Unless Kroger gave them access to all of their internal numbers (cost of good, cost of labor, etc). Their analysis is nothing more than a WAG with a targeted outcome (given that the client had a vested interest in said outcome). It’s like an in-house political poll, useful in limited circumstances, but often applied outside those boundaries.
It has nothing to do with food choices and has all to do with food availability.
That reaction seems a little touchy and oversensitive on behalf of what is, after all, a non-human entity with no feelings to hurt. If a widespread boycott makes it less profitable for Kroger to close stores in certain neighborhoods than to continue to subsidize them as “loss leaders”, so to speak, then instituting such a boycott could be a shrewd move, from the point of view of the Kroger’s customers in those neighborhoods.
I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong in trying to influence consumers to tip a business’s profitability scales in favor of a particular desired outcome. And I don’t see the point of getting offended because somebody criticizes a business for making a choice that results in an undesired outcome.
Kroger has the legal right to make whatever business decisions are most favorable to its bottom line. And everybody else, including Jesse Jackson, has the right to try to impact the favorability of those decisions by publicly criticizing them.
No idea. But I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about this field of study. Just pointing out that it was mentioned in the OP’s link
“Yeah, we can’t make enough money off you, so we’ll remove the stores from your neighborhoods and make you drive farther to get to our other stores.”
“Ok, so fuck you, we’ll boycott your ass.”
Seems perfectly fair to me. They are in no way required to continue to do business with that company and they have Freedom of Speech, right?
Or are we pondering some bizarro universe where criticising businesses is immoral or illegal? Or you know, just not right?
He’s still failing, I look at peoples’ political posts on Facebook all day long and listen every single day to political stations on Sirius XM - POTUS, Julie Mason, Steele & Ungar, Michael Smerconish, and even Patriot to hear the right-wing rants for perspective. And the first I’m hearing about Jesse Jackson’s recent activities is right here in this thread.
Oh to be sure, Jesse Jackson hasn’t been nationally relevant in over 20 years.
Given that our national food distribution system is entirely market driven, I think it’s fair to expect that the retailers will maintain some level of un- or less-profitable outlets. Of course, this needs to be legislated, probably at the state level.
There is no reason that we can’t require low income food distribution in the same way that we require real estate developers to include low-income housing at some percentage of their construction. But it is incumbent upon the legislators to set up the requirement and to make sure it applies fairly to all food retailers.
I agree that it is unfair to just decide out of the blue that a particular retailer is responsible for covering a particular area unprofitably.
I also think that given the high-density populations of most of these food deserts, it is de facto proof that our “WIC” and/or “FoodStamps” programs are not providing enough per family. Ostensibly, there is a certain amount of food money available to every family in the USA. If a large number of those families together are still not enough to make food distribution in the area economically feasible, then the amount we are giving is too low.