Said Del. Dereck E. Davis (D-Prince George’s), quoted in "In a bid to bring grocers to food deserts, Prince George’s turns to alcohol sales" (WaPo).
The issue is whether to let grocery stores sell beer and wine. They'd be more likely to open if they can sell beer and wine, and there are places in the state (Maryland) where there aren't enough grocery stores, and that's detrimental to the health of the poorer people who live there. But there's also the idea that beer and wine are bad for people (and that food stores selling booze is bad for the business of liquor stores).
The Davis remark is interesting, because it suggests that it might be possible to pressure businesses into opening stores as a way of expressing respect for black people or — to put that negatively — to avert accusations of racism. There's also the idea — is it racist? — that black people need to be protected from making their own choices about which beverages to buy in the store.
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144 comments:
"It’s a sad commentary on those corporations."
Or is it a sad commentary on -- oh, well, it's never a sad commentary on -- oh, well.
Cognitive decoherence by Democrat politicians in Maryland is nothing new. Anyone remember, ‘we gave them space to destroy’?
There is a much higher profit margin in alcohol sales, which allows what may be an otherwise unprofitable grocery store to operate.
Evil corporations selling something the customer wants. Why, there aut’to be a law...
Alcohol use is much lower in the Black community. BUT problems related to alcohol use are much greater in the Black community than they are for Whites or Latinos. Isn't that odd? Some people say that this odd phenomenon is a product of "social sanctioning" "inside and outside" the Black community. Other people claim that it is a product of (racial) differences in sensitivity to alcohol.
I mostly shop in white areas, and there has always been beer and wine available to buy in supermarkets wherever I have lived. This sounds like the old rules against selling firewater to Indians.
The logic is ridiculous. People won't drink if there is no beer and wine at the grocery store!
Guess there are no liquor stores in PG county.
Democrats are fascist, fascists direct private corporations to disregard economics in some decisions in return for being allowed to stay in business. This is nothing new. It's no different than pressuring Delta to pressure the Georgia legislature by pissing off large tranches of their own customers. Under Democrat fascism, corporations are often required to "take one for the team."
I visit Maryland from time to time, and I have never noticed that my hosts were short of firewater, supermarket bans notwithstanding. I bet this has more to do with political connections and donations of liquor stores. Liquor licenses probably require a little back scratching and palm greasing to get, I would imagine. The rest of this is pap for the rubes.
No booze justice, no peace. But booze justice also disturbs the peace. What shall we do.
Punishing shoplifting would solve many "food desert" problems but that would be racist.
What was the question there arent enough licqour store or not enough nutricious food, one has nothing to do with the other
SDaly said...
There is a much higher profit margin in alcohol sales, which allows what may be an otherwise unprofitable grocery store to operate.
And you can bet it's even higher in a place that only allows alcohol to be sold at liquor stores. Bringing in grocery that cut into that profit margin is going to be a hard sell.
These lefties insist that black folks be treated like children, without the capacity to make rational choices and decisions. Seems to work for them and it hasn’t been a short run.
Tri-state area booze laws I'm familiar with are a crazy, confusing patchwork for a young drinker trying to drink: in NJ can only get booze, including beer and wine, in liquor stores, so every strip mall has one, none of that in groceries or delis. Many towns close the liquor stores down on Sundays. NYC: beer and wine coolers/hard seltzers available in most groceries and many delis, but hard alcohol and wine only in liquor stores. Grocery stores/delis can't sell their beer from Sunday's wee hours until the afternoon, although liquor stores are often open--they just pay a fine/tax to open on Sundays. CT was the worst: state-licenses "package" stores 100% closed from Sat 7pm through Sunday, so if you didn't plan ahead you were crossing state lines or your party was fucked. Only time I've ever purposely recreated in a dry town was Ocean City, MD. Figured once I had kids, it was a guarantee of a family-friendly beach/boardwalk scene, but we found ourselves heading out of town to stock up which was annoying.
Once upon a time our local rag did an “expose” of a locally owned grocery store chain. Their sin was charging 10% higher prices at their location in a “disadvantaged neighborhood”. The owner wrote a letter to the rag saying in essence “I wish 10% got us to break even at that location. Inventory shrinkage is closer to 30%” They’ve been gone a long time.
If there is one item the inhabitants of food deserts crave it has to be arugula. Progressives sense this and thus their concern. Plus bad wine is not an attractive item. Ever.
Democrats want blacks segregated on plantations - or reservations. knocked down and corralled by drugs and alcohol. Kept angry by hollywood propaganda.
Doesn't matter, because you need an ID to buy alcohol, and poor people are incapable of getting an ID
It is as racist as the drive to legalize marijuana on grounds of racial justice. The idea being that outlawing pot is racist because too many Blacks are arrested because too many Blacks like getting high and selling dope, or so the argument goes. Granted, the latter part of the argument is usually left unsaid, but it is implicit in what is said.
Here, the argument is that Blacks, like them Injuns of old with their firewater, like to get drunk, which means higher alcohol sales to encourage grocers to come in.
OF COURSE it is racist. It is a progressive liberal idea. So, I repeat, of course it is racist.
The fight to sell liquor is the fight for a near guaranteed business. As others have noted, margins on alcohol are ridiculous, and the product is very compelling to its most enthusiastic customers. Have you ever seen a liquor store go out of business? I can't think of one. I know the Freakonomics people did something like this on pizza shops in their book, but I've seen those close. Can't think of a single disappeared liquor store even in gentrifying areas of Brooklyn with crazy rents where most businesses fail. In fact they usually wind up expanding.
There is a move by democrats in Denver to allow grocery stores to carry regular alcohol. This angers the local liquor store small business community who have been plying by the rules for decades.
One store/ per owner.
If the mega-grocery stores can carry alcohol - the small family run liquor stores will probably go the way of the dinosaur. So when a democrat tells you they care about small business - it's all BS. They lie.
Isnt prince georges an affluent part ofmaryland, i dont understand the question.
They can't see the cause/effect because they loathe finance. Grocery stores operate on thin margins of one to two precent, so there's no room for government skimming. When government imposes high taxes and requires developers to bribe city politicians to get permits and approvals and then allows government approved shoplifting and rioting, well, you're going to get fewer grocery stores.
Weird how democrats want us all boozed up and drugged up.
Get high or stoned or piss drunk, watch some Colbert or some Maddow - get mad and angry! and vote democrat.
And as soon as a grocery store moves into the neighborhood, the anti-gentrification hustlers will start calling it racist.
Have any of these politicians decided to give up their government gigs and open a grocery store in one of these "food deserts" where people are being underserved?
I bet not.
Why bother? Many drugstore locations (Walgreens among them) have closed in San Francisco.
In California you can steal anything up to $950 and it's a misdemeanor. And in San Francisco those are not being prosecuted.
Think about that. Walk into any drug store or grocery store, grab all the booze and filet mignon you can carry, and walk out.
The store security won't dare stop you for fear of lawsuits or being cancelled as racist.
These corporations are large, but even they can't keep taking a hit from losing tens of thousands of dollars per day.
The alcohol thing goes way back to blue laws, and in some cases not being able to compete with state-owned liquor stores, I believe.
I've lived in neighborhoods ranging from nearly all black (Milwaukee) to merely mostly black (a couple places in Oakland), to majority Asian (a couple other places in the Bay Area) to mostly Latino.
I never, ever, felt like I couldn't find fresh fruits & vegetables or anything else I wanted to eat in a reasonable drive or walk.
The broader data also back that up.
This is bullshit.
If a Black dies while resisting arrest, the local stores will be looted and then burned down by local youths.
A few years ago WSJ ran this story about Whole Foods opening a new inner city store and they interviewed government officials who fawned about how this a model for the elimination of food deserts. It didn't smell right to me and sho nuff- five minutes of investigation showed this was not an inner city renewal but Whole Foods capitalizing on setting up adjacent to a major medical facility that happened to be in the inner city. They were capturing the employees coming in from the burbs, buying lunch and groceries for the ride home.
I still don't know if the government people were too stupid to understand the dynamic or they were just making shit up, hoping nobody would notice...
In Virginia, you can only buy liquor at a state-operated store. On the one hand, this offends my free market, privately-owned businesses, sensibilities. On the other hand, these independently-operated stores tend to sell the lowest-denominator stock or the high-end elite stuff. The state stores, on the other hand, are required to sell a wide range of brands, so you can find some niche booze that you want to buy, and not be stuck with what they have on the shelf.
You would think a more urgent task would be renaming the county so as not to honor colonizers.
And the county motto is “Ever the same.” So, what’s up with that?
In this country, if there is money to be made, someone will invest and make it. But in these so-called food deserts, there does not tend to be money to be made. If the disappearing merchandise becomes too high, the merchants pull out because they cannot make money. Look at the Target at I-24 and Bell Road in Nashville. They closed it down. Not because it wasn't busy, but because the losses piled up to the point they could not make money. With affluent neighborhoods all around, but a couple of neighborhoods that looked upon it as a cash crop. End of story. If you elect people who will not enforce the laws, then you eventually pay the price. So they will just have to go to the next town, ran by adults, to get their groceries.
Liquor makes any retail business better. Margins on alcohol are !00 percent or more. For many restaurants food is at best a break even proposition. All the profit is in alcohol...
The alcohol in the stores will be shoplifted all the time.
If a shoplifter is arrested, then the local liberal college will organize protest demonstrations against the store and try to force it out of business.
Kind of funny. They seem to be making out that a store like this is going to alleviate poor Black people's food desert problems.
The store security won't dare stop you for fear of lawsuits or being cancelled as racist.
There is the leftist argument at play again. Too many Blacks getting arrested for stealing, so enforcing theft laws is racist. Can't expect "that kind" to be civilized and it is wrong to hold them to any kind of standards on behavior, so the leftist thinking goes. Larceny laws exist only to protect the white power structure anyway.
There is a BIG strain of leftist thought -- which has also crept into some circles of Catholic Social Teaching -- which essentially says that private property is theft. So shoplifters and looters are simply taking back what is rightfully theirs.
And when theres no food left, then what, rheyll gripe about something else.
You know what else is a sad commentary on these companies? They don’t give the food away. That's how disrespectful they are to minorities.
Why locate there? You call the cops on shoplifters. Cops show up. Shoplifters escalate (is this privilege?). Criminal gets shot. Shopkeeper gets boycotted and harassed. Why bother?
From the article: "The bill failed, as did another bill that would have allowed beer and wine to be sold in some grocery stores throughout the state, following intense opposition from the liquor lobby and lawmakers outside Prince George’s."
This is mostly an issue of graft and business risk decisions. The reason the liquor industry lobby in Maryland (or anywhere else) pays politicians is to limit competition, probably including some of the Black politicians in PG county. This is also the reason the laws regarding liquor, beer and wine sales are so convoluted and difficult to change. Blaming the private sector for failing to "support" a given community is completely bogus as witnessed by the different situation in other neighboring counties where businesses operate under the same laws as PG county and where none of those businesses are specifically supporting those communities either. Get rid of the corrupt politicians, make the neighborhoods safe for businesses to operate, restrict the lobbyists and then get out of the way. It'll all sort itself out like it does everywhere else.
Mark said...
In Virginia, you can only buy liquor at a state-operated store. On the one hand, this offends my free market, privately-owned businesses, sensibilities. On the other hand, these independently-operated stores tend to sell the lowest-denominator stock or the high-end elite stuff. The state stores, on the other hand, are required to sell a wide range of brands, so you can find some niche booze that you want to buy, and not be stuck with what they have on the shelf.
And, at least based on my experience with the state run ABC in North Carolina, you get a lot better prices. NC ABC stores have a markup on liquor, but it's nothing like what I see in here in AZ where it's legal to sell in the grocery stores.
Food deserts and healthcare deserts and educational deserts, etc. are real. Entire stretches of towns and neighborhoods which are wastelands. No big grocery stores around, just the Korean-owned places that like to rip-off the Black folks. No hospitals or emergency rooms or medical clinics within a half-hour travel time (in D.C., there are no birthing centers "east of the river" (i.e. Anacostia) and no hospitals at all in the northeast or southeast sections of the District). And the schools are hell-holes.
One way that retail deserts are created is by people destroying and looting stores that are there. And a lot of those stores are Black-owned.
This is why we can't have nice things.
"The poor, in those supposed commercial wastelands entirely free of a fresh vegetable or fruit, prefer the diet they eat. This, not "food deserts," is why there are fewer businesses offering them healthier fare."
So we've moved on from "bake the fucking cake" to "open a fucking store"?
Has anyone suggested that the increased amount of crime and significant chance of having the store looted and burnt down is having an effect?
Grocery stores are low margin businesses. A lot of shoplifting can destroy them even breaking even. But selling high margin, high turnover beer and liquor can offset losses to theft.
Politicians like the one quotes would probably lose their minds if a grocery in a high theft area went to a behind the counter model of yesteryear. Not an impossible idea with the experience some stores have gained from curbside pickup over the last year.
Bring security and enforcement of the laws, and commerce of all types will follow.
Rephrasing the thought of the Delegate Davis: Corporate decision makers, and the owners of corporations, are so crazed by their hatred of black people that they refuse to open profitable stores in some areas, because such openings would benefit black people. And this crazed hatred is so widespread that no person or group with sufficient capital to open such a store exists. Apparently this latter statement also includes black people and groups of black people with sufficient capital to open such a store.
Put this way, the idea just sounds stupid. And it reveals an irrational bigotry (anti-white? anti-corporate? anti-rich? anti-entrepreneur?) on the part of Delegate Davis that makes me suspect he is being deliberately disingenuous in order to appeal to a voter base that shares this bigotry.
In Virginia, you can only buy liquor at a state-operated store. On the one hand, this offends my free market, privately-owned businesses, sensibilities
In a twist on the free-market sensibility thing, in New Hampshire you can only buy liquor from state run liquor stores. NH is clever enough to offer great prices and locate big stores near state lines to capture business from Massachusetts and Vermont who tax the hell out of liquor sales. NH puts the biggest liquor stores in the rest areas off the interstate. Massholes never have to leave the highway to fill their trunks with booze...
When the local Boston news stations used to have news, enterprising reporters would drive up to New Hampshire to catch the Massachusetts politicians filling their cars with rum and vodka, usually the same week said politician was on TV calling for higher taxes on Massachusetts citizens. Eventually the politicians stopped caring about being caught...
"There's also the idea — is it racist? — that black people need to be protected from making their own choices about which beverages to buy in the store."
Get with the program. Whether the idea is racist depends upon whose idea it is. So the question is, what race is Del. Dereck E. Davis?
And what's a Del.?
"Why locate there? You call the cops on shoplifters. Cops show up. Shoplifters escalate (is this privilege?). Criminal gets shot. Shopkeeper gets boycotted and harassed. Why bother?"
Except in a lot of places the cops are not called because the store owner knows that they won't show up.
We had our car windows smashed about 6 years ago. My wife's backpack (out of sight in the trunk) was stolen.
We called the cops. They gave us a number and told us 'good luck.' They would not investigate. They would not take fingerprints or photos. They would not show up at all.
It was in San Francisco, and those thefts are so rampant that they can't keep up when there are about 70 just like it every day.
I once saw a guy smash the window of a car in broad daylight 50 yards from the steps of City Hall...
"(in D.C., there are no birthing centers "east of the river" (i.e. Anacostia) and no hospitals at all in the northeast or southeast sections of the District). And the schools are hell-holes."
There hasn't been a Republican mayor since 1910.
Why isn't it paradise on earth?
I grew up in Detroit. I remember when we had grocery stores, and I remember the exact time when the groceries started leaving Detroit (along with all other businesses that could) until eventually there was not one single grocery store south of 8 Mile Rd. I believe a couple have opened back up in the new and improving (??) Detroit.
But they did not leave because of racism. They left out of fear, from violence, from threats, and from being unable to run a business safely without getting half their goods stolen. And when you put your life into the hands of random crime, your time will come. So people left. Sorry neighborhoods, but there are too many bad people among you. We're not dying for you.
That started in 1967 and progressed rapidly through the Coleman Young years until he got his wish and all 'interlopers' left.
Forward to 2021 and Walgreen's and CVS are leaving San Francisco because no one gets arrested, or even stopped for shoplifting. Criminals have been given free reign in San Fran, Seattle, Portland, and LA. CVS and Walgreen's have said- enough. They're closing down SF.
The thing is, corporations exist to make money, not to make a statement (except Delta, Coca-Cola, and MLB- apparently). If a society wants a business or service in a neighborhood, that neighborhood (i.e. it's people) have a responsibility to act civilized so that the business and it's employees are not in danger. Otherwise, they have no responsibility to the neighborhood. It is NOT a corporation's job to give you free stuff. It IS your job to act civilly in a civil society. Or...you can live Detroit, circa 1975, or San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago- circa 2021.
People DO have a say in how they choose to live. It is an individual choice. And while there are so, so many good people stuck in bad cities, their leaders seem to always look to make sure the bad, the criminal, the corrupt are taken care of, instead of the good. If the leaders of these cities, states, and the nation cared about their cities, states, or the nation, their actions would show it. Instead they show the opposite.
Rusty said...
I love this thinking.
People don't have food in their neighborhood.
Let's give them liquor.
Only a leftist could think of this.
There is a reason there aren't any supermarkets in those neighborhoods.
There is a reason there is an abundance of liquor stores in those neighborhoods.
See if you can figure out why.
The grocery stores should go ahead and colonize those neighborhoods even if it's unprofitable. It's the white man's burden.
Mark,
Food deserts and healthcare deserts and educational deserts, etc. are real. Entire stretches of towns and neighborhoods which are wastelands. No big grocery stores around, just the Korean-owned places that like to rip-off the Black folks.
Evergreen: Theodore Dalrymple on "food deserts" in the UK.
I lived in an actual, honest-to-God food desert for about seven years. It was in a corner of Emeryville (before the place really took off) that was a couple blocks from Oakland in three directions. The corner store was called "Bottoms Up Liquors." The closest store with fresh produce was ten minutes' walk or so, and the "produce" was hopelessly limp and covered in flies (only later did I wonder where the flies came from). To get proper food, you had to board a bus, and back then the local bus terminal was not where a single young woman wanted to be in broad daylight, never mind after dark.
How did I cope? I walked to the bus -- not the local terminal, but up to where the "grocery store" was -- and then I shopped at places with actual food.
I remember the "food desert" name being given to the area I worked at in SF's Mission District -- a ten-minute walk from 16th St. Mission BART -- where all the Black teenagers walked between McDonald's and Burger King. In between were a huge Asian market (called "Asian Market"), a pho house, a teriyaki-and-burger joint, an Indian buffet, a Chinese takeout place, and -- oh, almost forgot -- a huge freakin' Safeway. Plus, a street away or so, one of the better burger shacks in the city.
The Davis remark is interesting, because it suggests that it might be possible to pressure businesses into opening stores as a way of expressing respect for black people or — to put that negatively — to avert accusations of racism.
It sounds like pressuring business into opening stores as a a way of expressing disrespect for Black people is working much better.
I'm guessing Del. means 'Delegate' For a while I thought it meant 'Delaware' -- but the story made no sense that way.
h,
Rephrasing the thought of the Delegate Davis: Corporate decision makers, and the owners of corporations, are so crazed by their hatred of black people that they refuse to open profitable stores in some areas, because such openings would benefit black people. And this crazed hatred is so widespread that no person or group with sufficient capital to open such a store exists. Apparently this latter statement also includes black people and groups of black people with sufficient capital to open such a store.
Yep, that sums it up. Can't people realize that the difficulty with opening businesses in dodgy neighborhoods is simply and solely that stuff disappears from them at fantastic rates? There was one Safeway in Berkeley that always suffered, and finally closed. Why? It wasn't for lack of patrons; that store was more crowded and more patronized (and dirtier) than any other. No, it was the unbelievable level of shrink. Grocery stores operate on insanely tiny margins. That store remained in business long after any sane businessman would've closed it, precisely because it was the lifeline for a lot of poor Blacks in Berkeley and north Oakland.
“I mostly shop in white areas, and there has always been beer and wine available to buy in supermarkets wherever I have lived. This sounds like the old rules against selling firewater to Indians.”
Very much state by state, and locale by locale. Things are wide open here in AZ. Ditto with NV. Hard liquor, as well as beer and wine, in grocery stores, and the convenience stores are now carrying hard liquor. But in NV, my old law firm made a lot of money getting liquor licenses. In the NW, the states all only sell hard liquor in state liquor stores. WA, ID, MT, UT all have them, though the specifics vary. In MT, they are private businesses, with strictly limited prices and availability. Store in town, only one in town, and 1 of 2 in county, sold last summer to owners of a restaurant there - it was more profitable, but less work. Drinking liquor being sinful, the Mormons in UT only have state owned stores, that they try to hide as best they can. I am just surprised that they don’t put a live stream of the liquor stores online, so that Religion can better police the sins of its members. CO, until recently, only allowed 3.2 beer in its grocery stores. It was a big thing to allow them to sell regular beer and wine. Last I knew, NM still applied Blue Laws to beer and wine. You can’t buy it between midnight Sat and noon Sunday. They put a chain around it, and there is quite the line when the chain comes down at noon.
The problem with PG county and grocery stores is not just that they have a lot of theft, but that poor Blacks often tend to burn down their grocery and convenience stores when they riot. If they had been smart, those communities should have put every extra gun they had in front of their grocery store last summer when AntiFA was inciting BLM to burn down their communities. Grocery margins just don’t cover the stores being burned out in race riots. But maybe liquor margins might cover those costs.
I lived in PG county 40 years ago, when I worked in Suitland (initially at Census, later at NOAA, both in Suitland FOB 3). Closest I ever lived to a food desert in my lifetime. So, this isn’t a new problem. Just probably more urgent after the state and local governments there allowed AntiFA/BLM to burn everything down last summer.
I have a sneaking suspicion that so called food deserts, at least as they appear in urban centers as opposed to rural communities, are mostly a response to the food purchasing preferences of the locals.
LOL! You don't put such stores in such locations because it isn't profitable to do so, and everyone knows why it isn't profitable, even if they won't say it.
Beer and wine in grocery stores will tempt black people to make poor choices?
That train left the station decades ago.
white folk can have booze at grocery stores?
but Black people can't?
Because?
Why?
"...people need to be protected from making their own choices about which beverages to buy in the store"
Soda is the #1 product purchased under the food stamp (SNAP) program.
Tag is needed: "Government Picking Winners and Losers." If Althouse had such a tag, likely 20%+ of posts would qualify.
Here in CT, where grocery stores can sell beer but not wine or liquor , there is a liquor store right next door to every grocery store.
Apparently the same mythical black people who are incapable of obtaining photo id’s are also incapable of finding the liquor store next door.
I suppose that since they don’t have IDs they can’t buy liquor anyway—problem solved!
narciso said...
Isnt prince georges an affluent part ofmaryland, i dont understand the question.
Part of the DC suburbs, it's both rich and poor, depending where you go.
Fun Idaho fact.
In Idaho you (at least, Used to) have you liquor sales Inside city limits
(presumably, so that the other mormans can snoop on you)
Because of this, the dude ranches came up with solutions; so they could provide booze to the dudes
Thus; Warm River Idaho... Population 3 (that's right; THREE)
[Three Rivers Ranch.... Hi Lonnie! I'm promoting your place!!!]
Also,
Island Park Idaho... The town with "the longest main street in the USA"
[Island Park is US-20, and the dude ranches along it. It is 33 miles long, at 500ft wide]
When I lived on Capitol Hill without a car nearly 30 years ago, just three blocks from the Supreme Court, the only "grocers" nearby were mom and pop convenience stores. Eastern Market was a nice and popular farmers' market, and they did have something a little bigger than a convenience store close to the Marine Barracks. Both were a bit of a walk, but doable. If I wanted to go to a real grocery store, which back then was essentially Safeway or Giant, I had to make a long walk to the Metro and go for a few miles down the line.
Prince George's is, I believe, the most affluent county in the country for Black families. But it is also adjacent to the poorest part of D.C., so there is a big wealth gap.
It's a religious: moral/ethical/legal democratic choice. There is no evidence that diversity (e.g. racist) is a motive. It's not principally a people of black issue. Injecting diversity, or allegations of diversity, as misinformation, or disinformation, breeds adversity past, present, and progressive.
"Fat is beautiful" is a comorbidity and accounts for nearly 80% of Covid-19 cases. Should diet, exercise, and habits be managed through a single/central/monopoly regulatory system?
Bruce Hayden:
WA had state liquor stores until Costco sponsored an initiative to privatize the state liquor stores. That was in 2010. It passed that year and the state stores closed. The grocery stores now sell all kinds of booze: wine, beer and hard liquor. Chains like BevMo opened stores.
The initiative added all kinds of taxes onto hard liquor sales to make up for the mark up that state stores were getting. It's been a good trade. It got the state out of regulating and at the same time selling liquor.
To get proper food, you had to board a bus, and back then the local bus terminal was not where a single young woman wanted to be in broad daylight, never mind after dark.
>>
more than half of "poor" people own a car, last time I checked. there's no need to get on a bus.
There's a farmers' market on 36th and Market.
Food deserts don't exist.
“The initiative added all kinds of taxes onto hard liquor sales to make up for the mark up that state stores were getting. It's been a good trade. It got the state out of regulating and at the same time selling liquor.”
Yeh, and on the east end of the state, you drive to ID to buy your alcohol because if the taxes.
If Democrat Del. Dereck E. Davis thinks that black people are just so stupid and pathetic that they can't be trusted to have the option to buy alcohol while they're buying groceries, "that says a lot about [how he] think[s] of certain communities. It’s a sad commentary on [him."
Theodore Dalrymple thinks food deserts are nonsense.
"The British intelligentsia has thus come up with an abstraction that fits this particular bill perfectly—that is to say, the need to explain widespread malnutrition in the midst of plenty without resort to the conduct of the malnourished themselves: food deserts."
Oh, sorry Michelle Thomson, you already linked it.
When I lived in Cincinnati, the cops used to stop people coming in from Kentucky to see if they had purchased alcohol there. There are really strict limits on what booze you can bring in from out of state, because of the taxes. Even though Kentucky is part of the same Metro area. I think Ohio and PA have similar taxing issues and enforcement.
BidenFamilyTaxPayerFundedCrackPipe said...If the mega-grocery stores can carry alcohol - the small family run liquor stores will probably go the way of the dinosaur.
Regional liquor store chains are destroying small family-run liquor stores not grocery stores.
Chain liquor stores have greater pull and expertise and get larger consignments of highly desired stuff (e.g., Pappy Van Winkle bourbon) from distilleries. Smaller family liquor stores only survive when they know what their customers are looking for. When they get a consignment of certain brands, they call their customers. It is very common that certain Bourbon or Scotch consignments get sold out in an hour.
Grocery stores are only a threat if they have really good Liquor Department managers who so what the smaller operators do.
DavidUW,
more than half of "poor" people own a car, last time I checked. there's no need to get on a bus.
There's a farmers' market on 36th and Market.
Food deserts don't exist.
I didn't own a car, and for the first year or two I was living there by myself. Taking the bus to grad school and to work, forsooth!
Was the farmers' market there in the late 80s? Since you seem to know the area well, I was at 45th and San Pablo, more or less. Not a super-salubrious neighborhood, back then. It may have improved since; Emeryville when I visited it last was not at all as it was when we moved out, early 90s.
Food deserts do exist, but (as Dalrymple points out) they are a lot rarer than you'd think.
Mark,
When I lived on Capitol Hill without a car nearly 30 years ago, just three blocks from the Supreme Court, the only "grocers" nearby were mom and pop convenience stores.
These aren't the "mom and pop" stores where the owners are Korean, right? Because they be rippin' off black folks. They were Black-owned, or maybe even white-owned, so no hu-hu, yes?
To (re)state the obvious, the reason there are places where it's difficult to get fresh groceries is that in some places a grocery store can't survive, because a lot of people steal stuff.
It's probably more to do with antiquated and racist zoning laws dumping an overabundance of liquor stores in black communities historically, and less about "not respecting black people's choices".
Michelle, thanks for the link to the Dalrymple piece. That's a very wise man there.
And of course Arturo has to chime in with the obligatory racism accusation.
Yeah, that's right, they 'dumped" the highly coveted and squabbled over liquor licenses into black areas. You learn so much here!
If a real desert performed like our so-called food deserts in the US, people caught up in them would die from water intoxication.
Michael K:
Punishing shoplifting would solve many "food desert" problems but that would be racist.
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I would agree, if it wasn't for the plethora of YouTube videos I've seen of 'cop interactions gone bad' - majority of them about shoplifting. So many out there the escalate into violence that never go viral. My partner watches them (we do all streaming on our big ass screen) but I happen to catch them. Over time - I'd walk into the room while he's in the middle of one and I'll say "don't tell me - shoplifting, right?" About 70% of the time I'm correct. Having seen so many of these - tough to agree with the idea shoplifting isn't dealt with. More the opposite - and not very well.
I don't understand why stores in these areas aren't doing what our WA state weed stores do: put everything behind the counter and make people ask for everything. We do this for cigarettes why not everything? Would probably create a few jobs.
Arturo Ui @ 1:53 PM
It's probably more to do with antiquated and racist zoning laws dumping an overabundance of liquor stores in black communities historically, and less about "not respecting black people's choices".
If there weren't demand for the products they sell, the "overabundance of liquor stores in black communities" would result in some of those liquor stores going out of business. Market correction.
I didn't own a car, and for the first year or two I was living there by myself. Taking the bus to grad school and to work, forsooth!
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Your fault.
Cars are cheap, even I owned one in grad school.
Also your fault for living in Emeryville. Better choice would have been El Cerrito for a white girl. Just as cheap as Eville back then and a lot safer.
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Was the farmers' market there in the late 80s? Since you seem to know the area well, I was at 45th and San Pablo, more or less. Not a super-salubrious neighborhood, back then. It may have improved since; Emeryville when I visited it last was not at all as it was when we moved out, early 90s.
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If it didn't exist then, there were others in Temescal, West Oakland, Grand Lake, Dimond District and Berkeley of course. The Dimond district and Grand Lake ones have been around forever.
Will they have to show ID to buy the beer, and wine?......and how is that not racist? Jim Crow laws!!
“There is a much higher profit margin in alcohol sales”
Is it? That bottle of Jack Daniels is going to be the identical product no matter where you buy it. So why wouldn’t you just buy it from the lowest-cost vendor?
Well, one reason is because there aren’t that many vendors, as alcohol sales (and esp. high ABV alcohol) are heavily regulated, and this often limits the number of stores in any community. Then again, that bottle will keep practically forever, so why not buy it when and where it’s cheap?
Beer does not keep forever, so you might just buy it where it’s convenient to do so. But beer is often much less regulated than distilled liquors, and so is more widely available.
Wine, on the other hand, is something few consumers know much about and thus might be profitably sold because customers often don’t know whether the price on a bottle is reasonable; at least, it’s much less of a commodity product than liquor and beer. Unless your customers are just looking for maximum alcohol for minimum cash, of course.
I’d think major factors in locating a grocery would be the cost of doing business (and, yes, that would include the cost of insurance and security in high-crime neighborhoods and the difficulty and cost of finding employees willing to work there) sd well as how likely customers were to buy a few high-margin products while they’re picking up low-margin staples. Certainly deli take-out and other ready-to-eat products are more common now, but these are not necessarily high-margin as they can be costly to produce and plenty of it gets old-before-sold and must be discounted or discarded.
That, and, the stores may not be able to just raise prices to cover higher costs, as some zealous reporter will surely do a price comparison with the same chain’s big suburban store, and then bellow outrage to the skies that prices can be quite different. That, and, a store isn’t going to stock perishable foods unless enough customers actually buy it so it can move before rotting.
Then again, we seem to be in an emotion-driven disparities-always-mean-discrimination mode lately, so what’s reason and analysis have to do with anything anyway?
DavidUW,
Your fault.
Cars are cheap, even I owned one in grad school.
Also your fault for living in Emeryville. Better choice would have been El Cerrito for a white girl. Just as cheap as Eville back then and a lot safer.
In 1987, when I rented the place, I was paying $440/mo. (When we left, it was all of $475.) I don't believe I would have had a cottage to myself in El Cerrito for that money. Do you? This was a detached house, not huge, but impossibly big to me when I moved in. And I could play music (no, not pop or hip-hop or whatever; classical, b/c that was what I was studying) w/o bothering anyone. The only real problem, besides thugs, was ants. They were nasty, and they moved fast.
Sure, "my fault." I was not assigning fault at all. I chose to live there, and I made it work. After a year or two, my boyfriend (now husband) moved in, and we had a car. Which meant, naturally, that he got held up while pulling in to the parking out back. "Excuse me," the thug said. Oh, goody. Thankfully, he wanted only my husband's wallet, and not the car, or even the viola (worth more than the car) in the backseat. I'll say this for the landlords though: After the holdup, they put in a motorized gate.
Again, you are assuming a car. I love farmers' markets, but you mustn't assume that everyone can drive there. As I said, I made do. Berkeley Bowl (originally right across the street from the Safeway I mentioned, on Adeline; later it occupied the Safeway's space) was enough fresh produce for anyone.
In 1987, when I rented the place, I was paying $440/mo. (When we left, it was all of $475.) I don't believe I would have had a cottage to myself in El Cerrito for that money. Do you? This was a detached house, not huge, but impossibly big to me when I moved in.
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Buddy of mine lived in El Cerrito in 1997 for around $1000/month. Given that was the mid of the first tech boom, I think you probably could have found some cottage for around that. I went the other direction and bought an old beat up house in Oakland.
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Again, you are assuming a car. I love farmers' markets, but you mustn't assume that everyone can drive there.
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More than half of "poor" people own a car.
If a poor person doesn't own a car, he or she knows someone who does. You carpool to the market. I mean, I know people like to pretend they were "poor" in grad school and all, but you obviously didn't grow up poor or you'd know that.
>>Berkeley Bowl
>>
Easily accessible by car, BART, and bus.
Again, food deserts don't exist.
There are certain cultures that walk into a store and not dream of stealing anything.
There are certain cultures that walk into a store and not dream of paying for anything.
"Yeah, that's right, they 'dumped" the highly coveted and squabbled over liquor licenses into black areas. You learn so much here!"
Liquor licenses in MD are damned near impossible to get unless you purchase a pre-existing business that has one. They are typically passed down for generations. I know this because my family had several businesses with them. I also have a friend that somehow bought a carwash that had a liquor license. I assume that it was once a bar that was converted to a carwash. He maintained the license (although he never sold alcohol) so as to make resale more valuable should the business not profit.
Real American @ 10:00 AM
And as soon as a grocery store moves into the neighborhood, the anti-gentrification hustlers will start calling it racist.
It's already happened. In 2014,Black activists stopped construction of a Trader Joes in Portland- on an empty lot- for fear that it would bring gentrification.
Trader Joes stopped in Portland black community 2014. From the first link:
Trader Joe’s grocery chain has canceled plans to open in a predominantly black Portland community after it was denied by its leaders because of the concern of gentrification. The Oregon community’s fear was that the grocery store opening could attract a wealthier population into the community that could create displacement and inequality.
Funny thing, it's racist for whites to opposed blacks moving in, but it's NOT racist for blacks to opposed whites moving in.
We just got back from shopping in preparation for Easter and hosting a book club night next week. We went to three stores and all sold at least beer and wine. But I live in Texas and we still have freedom here. Oh, and minorities like good wine too.
Blogger Arturo Ui said...
"It's probably more to do with antiquated and racist zoning laws dumping an overabundance of liquor stores in black communities historically, and less about "not respecting black people's choices"."
Read my comment above and then rethink your comment.
Consider this. Homeless people eat out of dumpsters. How many homeless, dead of starvation, are there?
They've been luring nice grocery stores to distressed neighborhoods for decades, offering all kinds of government incentives and private/public partnerships. It's really sad that more often than not, even with the best of intentions and commitments by the corporations, the stores are forced out of business. They hire from the local population, giving good jobs to hundreds of people, and most of those people work hard. But there are still too many unreliable and dishonest employees, so that's a downside. Then there are the problems of shoplifting and vandalism. If they raise prices to cover the losses, they are accused of price-gouging.
Grocery stores are not very profitable businesses and those in less affluent areas are probably less profitable that those in more affluent areas. Barring grocery stores from selling anything (e.g., breakfast cereal, frozen vegetables, or alcohol) makes them less profitable and you'd get fewer of them.
DavidUW,
If a poor person doesn't own a car, he or she knows someone who does. You carpool to the market. I mean, I know people like to pretend they were "poor" in grad school and all, but you obviously didn't grow up poor or you'd know that.
Um, I was, in fact, poor in grad school. And I didn't grow up exactly rich; my HS experience was in a NYC "bedroom community," living in a house built by some nutter prepping for WWIII (walls were three-deep cinderblocks; roof was corrugated steel; &c.) In grad school I had no support from my parents, just my school stipend. That is why I also worked.
If you are defining the opposite of "food desert" as "place where everyone has a car, or can carpool, or can ride a bus, or other public transit, to a place where there is food, then yes, "there are no 'food deserts'." Because nearly everyone has a friend who will take them to the grocery store in extremis, and you can always walk or take the bus, and only nitwits don't own a car anyway. Have I covered everything?
Berkeley Bowl is, of course, accessible in all the ways you mention. Though Ashby BART isn't particularly salubrious, either.
If your friend found a house in El Cerrito in 1997 for $1000, I don't see how it negates the fact that I found a house in Emeryville for $475, as it was when we left it in 1992-3 (I forget the exact date). Inflation doesn't actually run 100% over the space of four years; he was paying much more than we were. (By 1997 we were in Rockridge, on Alcatraz, so a few blocks south of Berkeley; I could walk to school in a half hour or so.) And you bought a house in Oakland at that time. Either you weren't poor, weren't in grad school, or both.
DavidUW, I ought to add that I am the person who first posted here Theodore Dalrymple's takedown of "food deserts." And I ought to add that "Bottoms Up Liquors" wasn't literally the closest "corner store" to me; that would be "Janta International," a tiny hole-in-the-wall place that provided food and Bollywood videos to the Indian-subcontinent population in the vicinity (I'd say that 45th St. in our block was roughly 1/3 each Black, white, and Indian subcontinent). To my regret, I never bought anything there. Thirty-plus years on, most of the food I cook is Indian. Gasp! cultural appropriation! But it's so.
Drinking liquor being sinful, the Mormons in UT only have state owned stores, that they try to hide as best they can.
Hang on there, Footloose Bruce... imbibing liquor runs counter to the Church’s Word of Wisdom, which is more focused on the health of believers.
If there weren't demand for the products they sell, the "overabundance of liquor stores in black communities" would result in some of those liquor stores going out of business. Market correction.
**************
That's not how addictive substances work.
Rusty said...
Blogger Arturo Ui said...
"It's probably more to do with antiquated and racist zoning laws dumping an overabundance of liquor stores in black communities historically, and less about "not respecting black people's choices"."
Read my comment above and then rethink your comment.
Consider this. Homeless people eat out of dumpsters. How many homeless, dead of starvation, are there?
**************
Can you expand on that analogy? Your point is a little mixed up and unclear.
Maybe they could also agree to not sell any sharp implements like scissors or knives, and only carry healthy things like kale and bean curd.
No KKK member (all Democrats) ever said anything as racist and insulting as modern social justice warriors do about Blacks. SJW = 10th degree black belt racist.
There are no food deserts in law abiding areas. And beer and wine are sold in grocery stores in law abiding areas, without commentary or handwringing.
Donatello Nobody said...
Michelle, thanks for the link to the Dalrymple piece. That's a very wise man there.
And of course Arturo has to chime in with the obligatory racism accusation
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The piece itself raised race, as did the original post. Not me. And if you think zoning laws and redlining haven't been racially driven in American history, you slept through history class and I can't help you.
Blacks will just drive to other parts of town to get their booze, thus robbing their own communities of business and tax dollars. More leftist genius at work.
We once had total prohibition nationwide. Drinking probably stopped completely and peace lawfulness blossomed.
It takes a lot of balls to run a liquor store in the hood. Those people should be considered heroes.
Inflation doesn't actually run 100% over the space of four years; he was paying much more than we were.
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Rents did in the Bay Area. during that time. Again, first dot-com boom.
here's a random graph of that
https://medium.com/@mccannatron/1979-to-2015-average-rent-in-san-francisco-33aaea22de0e
Rents doubled between 1993 and 1997. So I'd bet in the late '80's you could have found a cottage in El Cerrito for equivalent rent.
And yes, I'm defining food deserts as non existent because you can easily drive, ride a bike, carpool, take a bus or train to a grocery store with produce. I do not state that food deserts exist everywhere you cannot walk to a corner store and buy produce.
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And you bought a house in Oakland at that time. Either you weren't poor, weren't in grad school, or both.
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The house I bought cost $117,000 in 1997.
Because Wisconsin state taxpayers paid for my education at the UW, I had saved money during college that I earned by working days/afternoons in the lab and weekend night shifts at the beer can hotel on Langdon, which turned into my down payment. My mortgage on that was less than I would have been paying in rent so I bought while I was in GRAD school at Berkeley.
You can grow up poor and adopt the behaviors of your neighbors and stay poor, or you can, as I did, do the opposite of everything they did, figuring that would lead to a different outcome. Turns out, I was right.
I sold that house for $505,000 in 2005.
Perhaps the Democrats can come up with newer versions of their old strategies and tactics to help ameliorate the situation. Enact a variation of their Jim Crow law - heh, call it Old Crow - and find some young Dem piss ants to play the role of old Head Usher/DNC leader Bull Connor to enforce.
"Will they have to show ID to buy the beer, and wine?......and how is that not racist? Jim Crow laws!!"
Much worse. C'mon, man That's Jim Tetradactyl!
Enact a variation of their Jim Crow law - heh, call it Old Crow
Progressive Crow (PC). One step forward, two steps backward.
DavidUW, that's a graph of rents in San Francisco. not the East Bay.
Cottages in El Cerrito are mighty scarce, b/c the fear of "in-law apartments" runs strong in them thar hills. My place in E'ville was part of a little development that included some townhouse-style buildings, some duplexes, and a couple of detached cottages, like mine. You will not find such a place in El Cerrito. Indeed, the closest I got to living in El Cerrito was a bedsit in Kensington. Do you still assume I was rich?
You can grow up poor and adopt the behaviors of your neighbors and stay poor, or you can, as I did, do the opposite of everything they did, figuring that would lead to a different outcome. Turns out, I was right.
You know zilch about "my neighbors" growing up; I've told you what our own house was like, and the community it was in. My parents were biochem PhDs, if that helps. It turns out that you don't automatically become rich if you have a biochem PhD from UW/Madison. Ultimately my folks made money, Mom in pharmaceuticals and Dad as a biotech patent lawyer (who worked as a paralegal all day and went to Fordham at night). But somehow I don't see them "adopting the behaviors of their neighbors." For one thing, "our neighbors" were fond of disco, and they -- were not.
DavidUW,
Might I ask what you studied at Cal? We must have been there at the same time.
In my experience, these "food deserts" are in high crime areas. Might that have something to do with supermarkets being reluctant to open stores in such neighborhods?
"overabundance of liquor stores in black communities"
To follow on my previous post, in case the point was unclear, most, if not all, of those liquor stores were in white communities when the license was originally issued.
Food desert is such BS. Just bring back the old produce huckster trucks and pay the hucksters to give the fruit away for free.
As an aside...
Isn't being carless and dependent on mass transit something Democrats aspire to inflict on everyone? Maybe we can just call those in food deserts today (if there are such) early adopters?
I live in a sort of first-ring suburb that is majority white but hardly lily-white. We have a large ShopRite grocery store that consistently has good prices and some awesome sales. There has always been a steady stream of minority shoppers who come from neighborhoods without as nice a store to make large grocery runs, usually on the weekends. A few people will carpool or hire a cab or a gypsy cab. I can't say that every single poor person could join in, but it seems to be economically doable when you get friends or family to coordinate.
I'm Not Sure said...
Isn't being carless and dependent on mass transit something Democrats aspire to inflict on everyone?
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What's wrong with mass transit? Do you fly yourself everywhere you need to fly to?
Like with Joe Biden, you can't move people that are stuck on stupid.
MDT, you should know when I'm being satirical.
The food deserts thing is mostly a myth. In large urban areas, there are industrial/warehouse zones that have no groceries because no one lives there. In a rough neighborhood I stopped into a chain grocery and they had 2 full time cops by the doors--imagine how expensive that is. So much theft and trouble will chase out your stores.
Another humorous aspect of the food deserts thing, is the Woke not counting the local bodegas as grocers because they don't sell EVERY kind of vegetable.
Another humorous aspect of the food deserts thing, is the Woke not counting the local bodegas as grocers because they don't sell EVERY kind of vegetable.
"What's wrong with mass transit?"
Aside from the fact it goes where it wants, when it wants, not where you want, when you want?
"Do you fly yourself everywhere you need to fly to?"
People fly to go to the market?
In almost all cases, 'food deserts' are made up. Just people bitching who like to bitch.
We still have a market economy in this country (how long that will be true is another issue). If there are "not enough" grocery stores in a particular neighborhood, that's probably because people who own/operate grocery stores don't think they can make an adequate profit in that location. If you want to encourage grocers to locate there, you can figure out how to make it profitable for them to do so -- or you can establish a store yourself. Or you can just bitch about it. The last option seems to be very popular these days.
"If you want to encourage grocers to locate there, you can figure out how to make it profitable for them to do so -- or you can establish a store yourself. Or you can just bitch about it."
Arturo, you're up.
Food desert
Food deserts happen in the breadbasket of Africa in the wake of social justice adventures, followed by Chinese neo-colonialism and taunting the social justice-mongers. Social justice anywhere is injustice everywhere.
Mayor Lightfoot Pleads With Walmart, Other Retailers To Not Abandon Chicago
Mayor Lightfoot said she’s hopeful major retailers will reopen the Chicago stores that were looted or otherwise damaged during protests surrounding George Floyd’s killing by police in Minnesota. But, she’s unsure of one of the biggest.
Mayor Lightfoot said she was on a conference call with Walmart and other major retailers that had stores looted or heavily damaged during the unrest in Chicago. She said she pleaded with them to not abandon Chicago.
WBBM, 4 Jun 2020
"She said she pleaded with them to not abandon Chicago."
Restock for the next round of looting? Sounds like a plan.
"Can you expand on that analogy? Your point is a little mixed up and unclear."
What is unclear? Economics or homelessness?
Meanwhile, a few miles away in Virginia, all of the grocery stores sell wine and beer. Yes, in poor neighborhoods. Yes, also, in prosperous neighborhoods. And no one seems to think it the least odd.
Apologies for being late to the commenting on this post.
I’ve been a point person for obtaining liquor licenses for major food retailers. Liquor licenses are a political racket, pure and simple.
It’s been about 3 years or so since I did a deep dive into the actual research (as opposed to the talking points) about so-called “food deserts”. Biggest takeaways were 1) number of people living in these so-called food deserts actually had their own autos and 2) when new, large stores came into the food deserts dietary critics now complained that the new chain stores allowed customers to purchase unhealthy foods at lower prices than were being paid at the small, independent stores which allegedly only sold limited produce assortments which were of uniformly poor quality.
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