Ah yes, Jesse Jackson. He was Hillary before there was a Hillary - the favorite target of (white) hot right-wing rage any time he was seen so much as buying socks.
So, he pisses people off by being alive and speaking in public, but he should go away because he’s irrelevant. Sound familiar?
“We’re losing money doing this, so we’re going to stop doing it.”
The appropriate response is:
(A) How dare you! If you stop doing it, people will suffer!
(B) shrug
© That’s a problem. Let’s see if we can find a solution.
That is exactly what im saying i thought was shown to not be be the case. I guess i was wrong?
You are either going to go stone broke or own the world, because the supply of that is due to end shortly after we run out of hydrogen.
Operating costs are probably too high and volumes too low for most chain supermarkets to deal with.
This article says otherwise. It says food deserts are not to blame for the growing nutrition gap between the poor and the well off.
The gap is growing because generations have been raised with no idea what healthy food tastes like and how it improves overall well-being.
As for boycotting Kroger, it’s a huge community goodwill opportunity for competitors.
I personally don’t give a shit if food deserts make people fat or not. Having convenient access to a supermarket is just a reasonable thing for people in a modern, civilized society to expect.
No argument there.
“If Kroger gonna leave us, we’re gonna leave Kroger. It’s boycott time,” Jackson said on WREG.
OK. Isn’t part of a free market deciding where and where not support will be shown? People are free to decide not to patronize any company they choose. What Jesse said bothers me exactly zero. People existing in food deserts bothers me greatly. I’m not saying that Kroger should be bound to keep their stores open, but I sure as shit don’t fault Jesse for what he said, and will support his boycott where possible.
Seems like that area was already failing to patronize Kroger sufficiently. How does this change the status quo?
Those stores were nasty and there was constant crime in the parking lots, and constant thieving going on inside the store. I grew up in one of the store neighborhoods and I don’t even like to drive through there in the daytime these days.There very well may be a food desert in that part of Memphis but what can you do when you can’t turn a profit (or you barely turn a profit but you can’t keep employees) and people are scared to park in the lot for fear their car will be gone or vandalized while they shop or they might get robbed on the way in or out? I don’t know what the man wants. For the store to remain open just because there would be a food desert without it even though people avoided the store because of earlier mentioned issues? Maybe he should open up a store in this neighborhood. See how well that goes.
Fair to whom?
No government can force someone to operate an unprofitable business.
IOW, what the hell are you talking about?
This.
Here’s my imaginary scenario of how this thread progresses:
OP: Jesse Jackson is such a whiner; he should stop complaining and do something about the problem!
Jesse Jackson: I notice that you are whining. Maybe you can stop complaining and do something about the problem!
OP: I fail to see any irony in this thread.
Crime near them is more a community policing matter, isn’t it?
Exactly this. I used to work in the headquarters of a very quickly expanding supermarket chain in New England (Boston area in particular) as a corporate manager and, even when we were opening up a brand new superstore a month, we still closed some stores because they just weren’t worth it.
The irony is that many liberals/leftists that most strongly advocate socialized policies to clean up bad neighborhoods want capitalist corporations to solve some of the most basic problems. That simply can’t be done.
Fuck’em. If a store is unprofitable, dangerous or outdated, it just may have to be closed. It isn’t the supermarket chain’s problem to provide services to shitty, crime-ridden areas and lose money in the process.
They are a business, not a charity (although almost all large corporations do provide large amounts of targeted charity where it is actually deserved).
Someone else is perfectly free to buy the store (probably at a steep discount) and run it themselves if they want to. Maybe good ole Jessie himself could take some of his millions and be a key investor.
And no, inner city poor people don’t eat the way they do because the (lack of) stores force them to. It is the other way around. Other types of ethnic poor people have plenty of access to small markets with fresh food in small mall markets. It is cultural and you you can’t change that overnight. Rural white trash eats roughly the same way for the same reasons. Good luck getting them to stop doing it.
:dubious: Well, when conservatives/rightists refuse to accept any “socialized policies” for government to solve the problems, the only other power capable of tackling them is the capitalist corporations.
ISTM that the real irony is when the conservatives/rightists reject “socialized policies” on the grounds that the good old invisible hand of the free market will solve the problems much more efficiently and productively—and then when the market finds it unprofitable to do so and nopes on out of there, the conservatives/rightists whine that it “simply can’t be done” and it was unfair to expect it in the first place. :rolleyes:
Fair point but there are some nuances there that I mentioned. Maybe Kroger can’t make stores like that work but someone else can. They couldn’t meet the needs of that particular community very well but everyone needs food.
Someone else can buy the land and/or building itself and make money if they did it right. If nobody wants to operate a supermarket in that particular area, there are certainly other things going on. Maybe it needs to be partitioned into smaller stores with high security including the parking lot or the food selections need to be adjusted for the people that live there. Someone will do it if they can find a way to make money from it but nobody is going to do it at a loss.
The government(s) don’t run full sized supermarkets anywhere in the U.S. outside of military bases so that is a non-starter. You have to give businesses a reason to want to be there through things like tax breaks and feet on the street policing.
I’ve also heard that some of those “food desert” stores closed in part because they couldn’t find qualified people to work there, even though they were sometimes in neighborhoods or small towns with unemployment rates approaching 100%.
ETA: The employees’ safety had nothing to do with it. The people there just didn’t want to work, period.