A City Without Chain Grocery Stores

One of the big problems with Woolworth Corporation’s (now Footlocker Corp.) general merchandise division, F.W. Woolworth, was the fact that they lingered in the inner-city too long. Mall based stores generally did fine but the downtown stores lost a fortune to “shrinkage”. The mall Woolworth’s were great for picking up little things that Sears or Wanamakers didn’t carry. And my daughter loved the costume jewlery counter - for three bucks my (then) little girl became a Princess. R.H. Macy closed their Jamaica Queens store because of shrinkage. You have to make a profit (or at least break even) to stay open.

I’m sure shoplifting has absolutely nothing to do with it. Employee safety? Of course not! It must be that all those big corporations (the same ones that jam diversity messages down our throats at every opportunity) simply are racist.

After the Watts riots of 1965, the burned supermarkets did not rebuild. Not until early 1992 did a chain grocery store open in South Central LA. A few months later, that store was burned to protest the Not Guilty verdict in the first trial of Stacy Koon, the cop who arrested famed thug and Black hero Rodney King. Here’s a word to the stupid: If you want something in your neighborhood, don’t burn it down.

The situation is the same in Cleveland. There are a couple of Aldis’, and a store that specializes in the inner-city- Daves’. But neither one is in the really bad areas. Aldi had a murder of a clerk a few years ago. Both have armed guards at the door.
I live in Strongsville, a white suburb of about 45,000 and we have five with two more being built. No guards. My mother lives in Willoughby Hills, a previously all white community that is presently learning about the joys of diversity. I took her grocery shopping and I was surprised to see an armed Willoughby Hills police officer wathcing over the check out. Then it dawned on me that blacks were now shopping there. Time to move Mom.

A few years back, a grocery store chain in Buffalo closed a store in the black community. Our local Buffalo News ‘angry black man’ reporter blamed everyone, including the chain, for not training the staff properly and not giving them support. In the last few paragraphs, he grudgingly admitted that SOME of the customers MIGHT have been part of the problem.

The truth is blacks had their black store and they wanted it to be staffed with black workers and black managers but they couldn’t make it work.

Blacks never admit they might be part of the problem.

In many small and medium cities, with high income residents, often independent groceries still exist, with or without chain competition. People still like more personalized service, fresher vegetables and fruits, and unique foods that chains often don’t have. But Detroit, unlike New York City which has few if any chains, is not a city. It is a post-apocalypse area with residents who depend largely on government handouts. Crime is a major, if not the major, economic driver. Drugs, not autos, support a greater number of “families”. What business that has a low margin, like large groceries, can survive in an atmosphere of shoplifting, auto theft, and purchases of junk food as opposed to quality meats?

Detroit should be walled off. Abandoned.

That is really telling A large metropolitan city and they have no grocery store chain. It isn’t just bad perceptions, it is a bad reality of shoplifting and lawsuits. Detroit would sink if it were not propped up by taxpayers from outside the city.

Feast-or-famine retail atmosphere in Detroit, with shoppers buying most of their food at the beginning of each month and trickling into stores at the end. Small stores have more flexibility than chain retailers to reduce their hours during slow times.

This statement is very telling, Detroit is mostly welfare receipts.

This really says it all without stating the facts. If there was money to be made there would not be a shortage of stores. The simple truth that is omited is that the clients are not profitable enough to deal with. We all know why that is. Detroit is an example of what black people are able to achieve when left to their own devices. I suppose this mirrors so many sad places in Africa. Too bad journalist must dance around the truth. Oh for the day when one could state the obvious. The media is to corrupted to expose the truth about this once great city. Race is the reason this is taboo. The article about the schools in Detroit shows that worse is yet to come as the future is one of uneducated youth without the hope of success unless they leave Detroit. I remember the war cry “if we could just run our own schools and cities you will see”. We see.

All the chain stores left because
1. It is impossible to find reliable employees to work in Detroit
2. More food was going out the back door than the front
3. Police were no where to be found when an armed robbery took place

Well, I think they are lucky to have even Aldi stay there. The prices are really pretty good, if you don’t mind a smaller and non-name brand selection. I don’t, since it is a German company, and I am of half German descent. I drive through (quickly) the bad areas of town here, and see that mostly all of the grocery stores in the immediate area are closed down, with only one or two remaining. But there are plenty of McDonald’s, Church’s Chicken, and stuff like that. So, it’s all the cities that have certain areas that the locals know to avoid that have a hard time keeping a decent grocery chain, not just Detroit.

I live in the Northeast, and in my medium-sized city there is only one grocery store in the inner-city. It is known as the Ghetto-Mart. I shopped there a few times over the last 20 years as the neighborhood degenerated. Now they have to close off the aisle with cold medicines with a lock and key!

What’s the last grocery store that was in Detroit, Wrigley’s? That comes to mind because that’s where my dad was working when the ‘67 riots broke out.

The Trumbull Corner Market that I used to live next to is still standing, though the apartment house I lived in burned down almost 30 years ago. That’s probably about all there is, convenience stores and corner markets.

I live jsut outside of Atlantic City. I’ve lived here for 30 years and have seen the coming and going of several supermarkets. When we first moved from Philadelphia there were two or three markets in AC and all of them closed due to “shrinkage” from theft and vandalism. THe last one was in a new shopping center, Renaissance Plaza, not far from AC City Hall. This was to be a new center of enterprise (hence the name) for the community. The market didn’t last very long. Theft, vandalism and fear won out and the owners “got out of Dodge”. The bottom line is that Atlantic City has not one supermarket.
The AC residents now go either downbeach to markets in Ventor or Margate or to Brigantine where there is a new ACME. People who work at these markets talk of the usual shenanigans from the AC people.

While national retailers steer clear of inner Detroit, they’re littered through nearby suburbs like Dearborn, Southfield and Warren. AND THIS GEM!.. For example, food stamp distribution can result in a feast-or-famine retail atmosphere in Detroit,

Dearborn, Michiganistan? and Detroit, Zimbabwe?

Like poor Winston Smith in 1984, I can instantly read newspeak and convert it to real English. Allow me to translate:

“Poor perceptions of Detroit’s market strength” (Blacks will only buy low cost items) “the costs of doing business in the city” (Any profit will be eaten up by shoplifting, robbery, graft, destruction of property, and days spent closed during riots), “and the difficulty of hiring and retaining good local workers” (Blacks won’t work, will steal, embezzle, sue, file racism lawsuits and rape fellow employees and customers) “scare away the big retailers, a city task force concluded in a report issued last year.”

Many of the drug store chains still operate in urban areas. If you ever go in one, notice that every item has an electronic tag on it, and there is a detector at the exit. A guard is next to the detector. All that security costs money and the costs are built into the price.

Grocery stores tried to operate in the inner city after the rights revolution of the 1960s, but eventually learned that they needed to place the registers deeper into the store, with more open space between the registers and the doors. This free space was needed for guards to have room to pursue those who were bolting away with expensive meats stuffed in their shirts. All that lost space means the cost of rent per productive square goes up, since what would normally be shelf space has to be used for a security zone. That’s for the customers.

For the employees, requiring a drug test or searching an employee locker invites a lawsuit. Every grocery chain I know of is unionized. Add the cost of a labor attorney for every store.

These costs are added to the price of goods in order to make a return on investment. However, to the Activists, higher prices than the suburbs mean that the grocery store must be “gouging.”

Finally, a conviction for theft is great deterrence. However, many companies discovered if they prosecute a shoplifter or employee theft in the warehouse — which is on tape — the inner-city jury will still walk the thief.

Why is a surprise that so many closed or refused to rebuild after a riot?

Even in the suburbs, stores that are run by blacks tend to be unkempt, have inferior quality food and are generally not run very well.
A good example of this, in the Detroit area (Royal Oak to be exact) is the Kroger supermarket at 13 Mile Road and Woodward (near William Beaumont hospital). As I had a relative in the nearby hospital I went into the Kroger store there to make a purchase. It literally STUNK in there, there was produce all over the floor, shelves were not stocked in an orderly manner. The employees (who were black) were “shucking and jiving” giving little attention to the customers that were there. Although I did make a purchase there, I would NEVER go back. A store like that gives Kroger a bad name.
I lived (and grew up) in Detroit during the 1967 “riots”. Detroit NEVER recovered from it. Add to it the “legacy” of “mayor” Coleman A. Young blaming white people for all of Detroit’s problems and you have a recipe for self-destruction.

What this demonsrates is that we are not in a post-racial America. This is pure racism. This is racial profiling. What is needed is another Tzar in the Obama white house to get to the root of the problem. This could be the job Al Sharpton has been waiting for.

Foks it’s time to stop treating blacks like the criminals that they very often are. This issue could probably be dealt with effectively on the CNN series, ‘Black and Obnoxious In America’. Maybe BIA 11. I mean lets face it, this show is not going away. The list of black grievances against white racism is not getting any smaller, but rather it continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Ah yes these are exciting times for America!

I believe retail grocery stores have relatively small mark-ups for their items, as opposed to, say, a sporting goods store. Unfortunately, this leaves grocery stores in a precarious position with regard to “slippage,” particularly five-finger discounts.

So in a nutshell: Supermarkets can’t survive in an urban environment because they can’t make a profit due to theft.

Why has it taken so long to discover that cities prone to violence and looting are now void of chain stores? Why would anyone sink a fortune into a store that upon any provocation can become the random target for looting and/or burning? Many areas in our inner cities are war zones, some on a scale close to that experienced in Third World countries and the Middle East.

Can we only scratch our heads when the only grocery store an elderly grandparent can reach on foot is burned and looted because of a hurricane or reported racial incident?

What is the solution? Is there one that ends with dialog?

Poor perceptions of Detroit’s market strength, the costs of doing business in the city, and the difficulty of hiring and retaining good local workers scare away the big retailers…

“Poor perceptions.” My perceptions are fine, now. When I was a university grad, I had poor perceptions crammed into my head by a liberal faculty with an agenda that was mired in fantasy. Now my perceptions are fine. (How condescending it is for them to just presume we all have poor perceptions!)

Warch the movie “Do the Right Thing.” You will see how blacks drive honest businessmen out of their community. Oddly, enough, it seems to be a celebration of this behavior.

Operating any kind of chain store in Detroit would require major modifications to the layout and operations of the chain. Armed guards and metal detectors at the entrance. Customers would be required to wear a store jumpsuit, no pockets with feet sewn in and be handcuffed to metal bars that they could slide the handcuff along as they walk down the aisles. The smallest item, even a pack of chewing gum would need to be in those big bulky plastic casings you normally find in electronic stores. Hand bags and weaves would need to be searched for pilfered items. Needless to say, all the store employees would have to be brought in from outside of the city limits.

I recall the actor John Amos from the TV series “Good Times” He owned or was a partner in a grocery store that opened in Paterson NJ.It was next to two large housings projects and opened to great fanfare by city officals some years back.It was at the site of a former Pathmark supermarket that closed. The residents were complaining that there was no place to shop.It was a noble intention by Mr.Amos to help the community but it didn`t last too long. I believe robberies and shoplifting were its downfall.I really feel bad for all of the decent people who have to suffer because of the actions of these criminals.

It’s about theft, plain and simple. I worked on an initiative to reintroduce a grocery store to a black, inner city neighborhood in a certain mid-Atlantic city, and got to learn up close why the previous store had packed up and left.

The story’s contention that a grocery is a tight-margin business is true enough, but has no explanatory value here. A place like Aldi has a very small amount of short-term perishables anyways.

The answer is simply that any store in such an area is bombarded with both theft AND fraud — people walking out of the store with merchandise hidden in baggy clothes, and adults paying with bad checks. The stores go “all cash” and hire security to deal with these problems, but that only continues the downward spiral. By that point, it’s only a matter of time.

Yet … I have no doubt that were such a store to open in downtown Detroit, the locals would complain about how it would put those “struggling, black-owned independent stores” out of business. As such, staying out of the market altogether is a highly rational decision for most chains.

— Istvan wrote:
One of the big problems with Woolworth Corporation’s …general merchandise division, F.W. Woolworth, was the fact that they lingered in the inner-city too long.
Mall based stores generally did fine, but the downtown stores lost a fortune to “shrinkage”.
……………………………

Although the last of the Woolworth stores closed here (in the US) some years ago, they still survive and are doing well in Germany. I wonder why! They lasted in England too, until they finally closed, I think it was just within the past year.

“Detroit’s nearly 1 million residents instead rely on independent stores run by local entrepreneurs for their most basic needs.”

Maybe the local entrepreneurs are paying off the city councilmen to keep the big guys out so the can charge outrageous prices. Or the ones that run the city are the ones that own the stores.

Why would any sensible person open a store in the city? Shoplifting will empty the store out real quick. Holdups will frighten or kill your employees. Delivery men will refuse to deliver after one or two is robbed, beaten and killed.

Perhaps Prez Obama can come up with a quota plan. If, say, suburban Detroit has 100 Giant Eagles or Safeways, it must have ten Giant Eagles or Safeways for the Detroit city limits.

Poor perceptions of Detroit’s market strength, the costs of doing business in the city, and the difficulty of hiring and retaining good local workers scare away the big retailers, a city task force concluded in a report issued last year.

1)So its the PERCEPTIONS that are poor, not the actual conditions.

2) Cost of doing business in the city=frequently being robbed, hiring armed guards, shoplifters, strong chance of being burned down and/or looted during a riot

3)difficulty of hiring and retaining good local workers=having to hire blacks, who will steal, show up to work sporaticly, and help in the eventual armed robbery of the store

P.S-People with food stamps do not BUY food, the taxpayers who fund the food stamps are BUYING food for them.

I guarantee that if any large chain had the stones to open up in Detroit city limits, they’d be decried for putting the independent stores out of business and in all likely hood, accused of racism.

“So Detroit is instead trying to nurture its home-grown grocery stores and help them grow. For example, the city is working on tax abatements for Honey Bee Market, which expanded in 2006 from 4,000 square feet to 15,000 square feet, and is now dealing with higher property taxes as a result.”

Gee, ya think?

Why should one store get tax breaks if others (and I don’t know that they don’t) don’t get them?

#18—I know the area you’re talking about. I liked going to the Ram’s Horn restaurant not too far from that when I lived in Ferndale. And Ferndale borders Detroit to the north, so you have blacks taking the bus from Detroit to work at the fast-food joints in Ferndale.

There are two McDonald’s in my town here in NE Ohio. If I do go to one (which isn’t often), I go to the one on the north end of town, because the other one, well, more blacks in that area, nuff said.

I wonder how many Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, or BMW dealerships are located in inner-city Detroit. Or how many new car dealerships of any franchise are in the inner city.

The simple fact is that the only type of business that can survive in an all black environment is usually a tiny sole proprietorship in which the owner-operator (armed and ready) can see the entire square-footage of the business from the area of the cash register. It can survive only because would-be thieves and armed robbers know that attempted robbery or shop-lifting will be met with either armed force or the jaws of an enraged Doberman Pinscher.

Detroit’s all-pervasive Black crime problem, of course, has nothing to do with grocery chains’ lack of willingness to open stores in Detroit. It just has got to be some other reason… maybe racism on the part of chain stores, in not wanting to have stores in Detroit constantly targeted for robberies and shoplifting.

“Poor perceptions of Detroit’s market strength, the costs of doing business in the city, and the difficulty of hiring and retaining good local workers scare away the big retailers, a city task force concluded in a report issued last year.”

Summary: Chain businesses always lose money in a high crime rate neighborhood.

Aphorism - News organizations philosophically dedicated to obfuscating the obvious truth deserve nothing but public contempt.

12 — Dutchman wrote at 9:47 PM on July 22:
I live in the Northeast, and in my medium-sized city there is only one grocery store in the inner-city. It is known as the Ghetto-Mart. I shopped there a few times over the last 20 years as the neighborhood degenerated. Now they have to close off the aisle with cold medicines with a lock and key!

Every place does that now, but it’s not because of theft. Thank the meth-making industry for making it harder to buy a decongestant.

“If I do go to one (MickeyDees)… I go to the one on the north end of town, because the other one, well, more blacks in that area”

There’s a McDonalds near where I live. They hired an Hispanic manager (apparently) and now virtually the entire operation is Hispanic. Same way with blacks too I’ve noticed. But whites, of course, have to hire non-whites too for the sake of ‘diversity’. No one working at McDonalds is someone to envy, really, but the above facts are the above facts.

“One of the big problems with Woolworth Corporation’s (now Footlocker Corp.) general merchandise division, F.W. Woolworth, was the fact that they lingered in the inner-city too long. “

I loved the old Woolworth’s. I grew up in the suburbs and have mostly lived in suburbs. But back in the day every suburb had a Woolworth’s. They were great for all sorts of things from nails and screwdrivers to sewing supplies to toys to candy and lunch counters. The city ones were the equivalent of a Walmart.

There was a huge one at Powell and Market right downtown in San Francisco. In the 1970’s and 80’s, when my kids were young and I was on a very tight budget, I always did the Christmas toy and ornament shopping in their huge basement toy department. What joy!!! About $120.00 bought ornaments and a big load of presents.

One year my son wanted an Atari, one of the first video games. All his friends had one and he desperately wanted one to keep up with his friends with his own Atari. I bought it very inexpensively at that downtown Woolworths.

That same year my 11 year old daughter really wanted a big beautiful doll house. I found one for only about $30.oo at that Woolworth’s.

It was a kit. We had a great time building it. She selected the color scheme. I bought some great real wood and marble victorian style doll house furniture for that dollhouse at the same Woolworth’s. The rest of the doll house furniture we made.

For instance, one of those little boxes checks come in and a length of narrow dowels makes an elegant canopied bed. The box is the bed, the top is the canopy. Cover it with fabric and there is an elegant bed.

She’s 42 now, and she still has that dollhouse.

Another great American institution, like public schools destroyed by blacks.

The total demise of the Playboy Magazine night clubs was also attributed to the black take over of cities. The Playboy clubs started about 1960 when Whites had already fled. No one wanted to stay in any dangerous city after dark to go to the Playboy clubs, so the clubs never really got off.

Who wants to be mugged after an evening out? So people dashed home to the suburbs.

What kind of an idiot would even go NEAR Detroit??? It’s a collection of slum neighborhoods, burned-out buildings, uncut grass (where there isn’t cement), and crime, crime, crime. Now, all these blacks who whine and moan about not being able to live in a city run by blacks for blacks, HEY — here’s your answer!! Move to Detroit and get out of our cities!!! It’s cheaper than a trip to Haiti or Africa, where you can also experience what it’s like to live in an all-black society.

“Poor perception’s about Detroit’s market strength, cost of doing business….”

I would not call those perceptions “poor” at all. They are entirerly rational and justified. It never fails to amaze me how American journalism can so CREATIVELY dance around the issue of race, especially in regards to blacks.

Actually trying to do business in any black area is simply more trouble then it is worth. So much extra energy has to be put into security and avoiding theft/pilferage that there is simply no profit margin for businesses to expect.

We all know what’s REALLY wrong with Detroit but nobody will say it. Imagine if through some fantastic act it were somehow possible to magically switch all of Detroit’s population with an all-White or Japanese one. How many people think Detroit wouldn’t at once start to rebuild itself again? As for the area the blacks had been switched to it would soon resemble another Detroit.

On Cities Without Chain Grocery Stores. In 1958 I graduated from college and moved to Berkeley staying with my roomates family. there I learned of the Berkeley COOP. I moved away, returning several years later t learn the liberals had taken control of the COOP. They signed a lease with the owner of an abandoned Safeway store. they stated they were going to provide for sale of groceries in a minority area of Oakland. It lasted about a year, the theft rate was so high it drove the COOP out and put it into near bankruptsie The liberals still did not understand what they had done, they then amalgated with a smaller coop in the SF pensula that was in serious financial trouble due to theft and bad checks.The whole mess finally collapsed and the COOP closed down. The remains may of been reopened as a smalllocal store, but I am not sure of this. Moral of the story, they only thing liberals are liberal with is other peoples money, property and civil rights. GR

“…Every place does that now, but it’s not because of theft. Thank the meth-making industry for making it harder to buy a decongestant…”

I don’t know it it’s true across the country, but here in So California, decongestant is locked up behind the pharmacy counter (or behind locked, screened cabinets) and one must SIGN a form, and present identification to buy it.

The first indications around here that mexicans are moving into an area are the number of items behind locked cabinets at the local grocery store. First is was cigarettes and ‘high-end’ liquor and now it’s batteries, baby formula, some more expensive toiletries and shaving products and other expensive easily stolen items. Each month it seems something else goes behind locked cabinets where one must ask the manager for a key to purchase an item.

That’s when I changed grocery stores—but the problem is the mexicans drive in (without licenses, insurance or registration that I am required to carry here) from their self-created ghettos. Since American grocery stores won’t locate in those areas, a number of mexican grocery stores have moved in. Wonder what they do about the ‘shrinkage’ their customers are known for?

Unfortunately, many hispanics think they are being ‘gouged’ or want to shop where Whites shop—the stores being much nicer and cleaner, the product selection better and fewer items locked up. I went into a hispanic grocery store exactly one time and the wretched smell drove me right out the door.

Bon

I’m laughing in agreement with Bon, who said the smell drove him out of a Mexican market. Yeah, if you go to the south end of my town, all the markets are Mexican and you’d best be able to read and speak Spanish if you want to buy something. I can, luckily -I took Spanish starting in 8th grade in school, and I’m fairly fluent, or at least fluent enough to buy naranjas in the Mexican tienda. Actually, my best language learning came from my kids when I taught in the public schools. THAT was an education! But yes, the Mexicans are definitely moving in and taking over this state. That’s why I’m planning to make my last move (I’m 64) to Virginia. It may not be Mexican-free, but it isn’t like California, which the Mexicans feel is theirs anyway since it was “stolen” from them in the last Mexican War….

Isn’t it mostly about finding reliable staff, I would argue—to exploit, like all the suburban supermarkets here in upstate NY.

Here in the Buffalo area, chain supermarkets like Wegmans find all the gullible, young white working-class women to grunt-staff their supposedly honorable businesses. I often both marvel at their industriousness and find them pitiable. And what women want most in a workplace seems to be safety.

Would any do a commute to the inner-city location, if there are any?