Before I go any further in this discussion, it seems to me that there are other stores readily available in that neighborhood. Is that true or not?
Yes, the stores that helped cement the bad purchasing habits that helped lead to the nutrition gap between the lesser and well off in the first place.
Lots of aspersions being cast against Save-a-Lot in this thread. We have them here. They’re grocery stores, not food desert junkfood bodegas. I don’t shop at one regularly because I’d have to drive through a bottleneck. There are things I can’t buy there but that goes for my shitty Giant as well. It would be nice to have oversized Wegmans like out in the burbs but it’s a city and space is a expensive.
The other Sav-a-Lot in town is in a somewhat better neighborhood (within walking distance of a college) and that building looks a lot better. I’ve never been in it either; no, I don’t have anything against SAL but there are other stores near my house that I like better, plus I don’t have to bring my own bags or boxes which is what they do.
For what you claimed - that people only bought the loss leaders at Kroger, and that was why it wasn’t profitable. Is that really true, or is it something you just made up?
Regards,
Shodan
This is the same poster who needed hand-holding to figure out that there are grocery stores across the street from the closed Krogers, so don’t expect any actual evidence.
This thread has sort of flipped Yogi Berra’s quote on its head - “Nobody ever goes there, it’s too crowded”.
Kroger’s allegedly loses money because people only buy the loss leaders, so Jesse organizes a boycott to keep the store open so Kroger’s loses money on its other stores so that it will re-open the store and lose more money. Then they can write it off on their taxes.
Buy at five, sell at three, make up the difference in volume, except you haven’t got the volume. Apart from that, it’s a good strategy.
Regards,
Shodan
Please cite anyone in this thread who has said that Kroger should be mandated, by government, to operate unprofitable stores.
Please cite where I said that people only bought the loss leaders at Kroger.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, there is a save-a-lot. Yay.
Not really aspersions so much as observations. If the concern is over fresh foods, then save-a-lot is not the answer.
Processed, pre-packaged stuff, sure. They have tons of that. Assuming that off-brand processed food isn’t any unhealthier than branded processed foods, they have the same stuff, at pretty much the same price, just less convenient as it comes in smaller portions.
I’ve just been back through the thread trying to find someone suggesting that calling for a boycott is not covered under our freedom of speech doctrine. You know what? I can’t find a single example.
Calling for a boycott is absolutely an acceptable use of your first-amendment rights. It’s completely acceptable. But that doesn’t address the question of whether it’s smart, or whether it demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how social and economic policy work, or whether it shows any grasp at all of the possible unintended consequences.
[quote=“k9bfriender, post:122, topic:811839”]
As far as them keeping open unprofitable stores, why not? There are tax benefits to doing stuff like that that I am sure the accountants can find…]
Another person who doesn’t seem to understand how taxes and tax write-offs work. If you lose some money in one part of your business, you can deduct the losses from your overall earnings in ways that will reduce your tax liability. But you’ve still lost money. With a very, very few narrow exceptions, losses cannot simply be made up by some magical, mythical tax benefit.
If one Kroger store loses the company $1 million is a year, then that loss is deducted from the profit made by the rest of the Kroger chain. As a result of earning $1 million less profit on the year, the company will be able to reduce its tax burden by some percentage of $1 million (whatever its corporate tax rate is), but it will still lose money.
Emphasis mine.
These two sentences seem to be incompatible. If corporate behavior is governed by the bottom line, as you suggest (and, as a general proposition, I completely agree with you on this), then why would Kroger close a profitable store? Are you really going to suggest that the store made a profit, but that they decided to close it just to make life miserable for poor people who don’t own cars?
Also, your claim about the store’s profitability is based on nothing but speculation. Unless you’ve seen the books, or are getting your information from someone who has, you’re just engaged in wild-ass guessing. And as I said, if it really was profitable, and companies are governed by the bottom line, why would they close it? Even Jesse Jackson, as far as I can tell, isn’t accusing tthe chain of lying about the profit levels of these stores.
As for your broader point about public relations, it’s definitely true that companies like good PR, and do what they can to get it. But they might already have weighed the costs and benefits, in terms of PR and other issues, of keeping these stores open.
There is no doubt that this sort of strategy can, at times, be effective. And if you could get a large enough boycott going to significantly dent Kroger’s bottom line, to the extent that the losses are greater than what they were losing at the Memphis stores, then there is a possibility that they might decide that the combined monetary and PRR losses are bad enough to justify keeping the stores open. I just think you’re dreaming if you think that’s going to happen.
I can’t help your boycott. I’ve never, to my knowledge, set food inside a Kroger store, although I have, on occasion, shopped at Ralph’s, which is owned by Kroger. Much more importantly, how do you expect the people who live in neighborhoods where the Kroger might be the only store, to join your boycott? If a person lives in a community where the only store they can get to is a Kroger, are you really going to ask those people to voluntarily create a food desert for themselves (by boycotting the one store they have) in order to protest against a food desert in Memphis?
I’m not blaming Jess Jackson for trying to bring attention to this issue. I think it would be a Good Thing[sup]TM[/sup] if we, as a society, could make sure that everyone has access to reasonably priced and nutritious food. And I would support certain types of regulatory or redistributive frameworks that might help make it happen. But the problem is far more complex than some people seem to appreciate, and there are probably much better solutions than simply trying to force one particular grocery chain to keep open a money-losing store.
LOL.
Do you really think this one incident is what has “gotten people discussing poverty”? Some of the very policies we’ve been talking about in this thread, like SNAP (originally Food Stamps) are over 50 year old. One of the hallmarks of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was called the War on Poverty, and improved nutrition for people in poor communities was a central plank of that policy platform. People, including government officials, social scientists, medical researchers, physicians, economists, policy wonks, clergy, and community activists, have been talking about poverty and the best ways to deal with it for decades. The fact that “food desert” is a part of the vocabulary reflects the attention this problem has received.
Some of the studies I linked in an earlier post show that fixing the problem of nutrition among the poor might not even be as simple as making quality food available to them; it requires changing spending and eating habits, which can be difficult cultural habits to break. And trying to change people’s habits often runs into the inconvenient reality that some people (for whatever reason) don’t want to be told what types of food they should be spending their money on. Maybe the best solution would be to deliver a box of fresh vegetables to poor people’s doors every week, and have an agent of the state (armed if necessary) stand over them while they cook it to make sure they’re preparing healthy meals? We know what’s good for them, after all!
I didn’t say otherwise. Did I call out anyone, or claim that they had?
And that is why you may make your own decision as to whether or not to support it. The OP in this thread specifically called for Jesse Jackson to shut the fuck up. It was not that he didn’t think that he would support it, it was that he didn’t want people talking about it.
Not exactly. Many things here. You have different types of taxes for different types of costs. Costs of doing business are normally just written off as they come. Other expenses get written off entirely differently. Capital depreciation, like that of the cost of the store and its improvements, is written off over a longer period of time. Loans are written off differently as well. Charitable donations end up in their own catagory.
It’s not magic, but it is complicated. And Kroger has giant teams of accountants to make the complications work to their favor.
Also, note that I did not say that it would make up the losses, that was not a claim I made, whatsoever, only that accountants can find benefits in doing that. You may have assumed that I meant that they would find some magical way of profiting off of losses, but that would only be your assumption. The point was that if they are “losing” $1 million on a store, that is not a million dollar loss to the bottom line. With some creative accounting, it is probably a small fraction of that.
Nothing incompatible there. You can be profitable, but not as profitable as you want to be.
Example. I have 5 grocery stores. 4 of them profit me $500 a day. One of the profits me $100 a day. Closing the $100 a day and concentrating my capital and resources in the the 4 more profitable ones makes sense in many scenarios. Especially if you can free up capital by selling the property.
Not my claim, it was a claim made in the article linked in the OP. Not wild ass guessing, just reading.
The claim contained a link as well. If you want to discuss the cited articles, and the studies that they cite, go for it, but it is not speculation or wild ass-guessing on my part.
And the weights of those costs and benefits change when public perception of your company changes.
Not my boycott. I can’t boycott them as I’ve already boycotted them over the kroger plus card and not being open 24 hours a day.
And, as I’ve already said in this very thread, it is not the poor people that I would expect to boycott. They need to do what they need to do to survive. It is the wealthy people in middle class neighborhoods who would be putting the hurt on Kroger by going to one of the other half-dozen grocery stores that are just as convenient to them as kroger is.
It is a complex problem, sure, but there are no solutions if we don’t even try. People have limited ways of putting pressure on corporations, any boycott is just about it. If the boycott is enough, then Kroger may decide to re-open stores, and while they are at it, use their leverage as one of the largest companies in the US to get themselves some extra tax breaks for doing so.
No, this one incident doesn’t start the conversation, but it does rekindle and keep it going for the vast majority of people who only think about things that affect other people when they are in the headlines.
There are solutions to that, as I said in this thread. There are outreach programs and classes. The kroger right around the corner from me offers classes on how to shop and cook healthy meals. Things can be improved if those with the resources to improve them care enough to do so.
See, now that’s actually a terrible idea, and if I didn’t know better, I would think that it was not offered in good faith as a way to address and solve the problem, but rather to simply try to distract. Were you actually looking to promote and defend it?