[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img] When I flew the red-eye into JFK airport last month, my in-laws met me at the airport with food and diapers. Yes, I was flying from the second largest city in the country to the largest, but I knew that it would be a day or two before I could take my rental car and make my way to a store that had reasonably priced, fresh (if not organic) food, and diapers that wouldn’t set me back as much as my mortgage payment.
I’m no fan of large-scale supermarkets or big box retailers, but if there had been one on the way from the airport to my grandmother’s house in East New York, I would surely have dropped in to pick up a few essentials. Instead, I had my family buy me and the baby stuff from stores in Long Island and bring them to the airline terminal at 5 in the morning, bright and early.
For this very reason, I’m so tired of people bashing Walmart or other retailers that want to locate in “undesirable” neighborhoods. If you don’t like it, don’t go. The company wouldn’t survive by lack of patronage.
I certainly don’t go to Walmart. I don’t think I’ve been in that store since 1995 or so. I also first went to one that same year, during graduate school, because I was poor and it was the only game in town (okay, way, way out of town) offering low prices on stuff I needed. Living on non-dischargeable student loans is a hairy business. And a lot of the same folks who have something to say about where you shop are the first to criticize students for spending borrowed money unwisely. So to save my pennies, I did all the economizing I could. Yes, that meant bypassing locally owned “boutique” shops that charged an arm and a leg for everything – assuming we college students (it was a college town) were a captive audience – and going to the vast blue, yellow, and grey discount land.
Sounds Elitist to Me
I’m starting to think all the bashing of Walmart and its exploitive cousin Aldi smacks of elitism. It’s funny how people with a lot of choices have a lot to say about those with few. The cause célèbre appears to be “food deserts.” Apparently the First Lady uttered the phrase and every limousine liberal and well-fed food writer jumped on the bandwagon.
I’ve lived in two of the so-called food deserts: inner-city New York and rural upstate New York. Despite their different look, they have a lot in common.
Food deserts aren’t quite devoid of food, per se. Instead theyare populated by few stores, a lot of fast food restaurants, and down-market grocery chains that charge a lot of money for low quality food.
During my recent stay in Brooklyn, I paid two dollars for one, yes, just one, stick of butter. This was the cheap choice in a sea of hydrogenated margarine and lard, all carefully placed behind a locked case. In addition to having to pay highway robbery prices (eight dollars per pound for crappy butter), I had to suffer the humiliation of getting someone’s attention and asking for what I wanted from behind the locked case, like some teenage boy purchasing his first pack of condoms in a crowded pharmacy. Let me tell you, upstate New York was no better. Food there was also a budget-buster. The two local chains (unreachable without a car), squeezed every nickel they could out of you. The best examples were their deli items. They were sold by the half-pound. At first blush, the prices looked normal, until you looked a little closer. Yes, that’s right, almost twelve dollars a pound for sliced turkey breast – and that was in the 1990s. I can only imagine what it’s like two decades later.
Eight Dollars for Butter?
All the talk that I hear about mom-and-pop stores being threatened when big box stores move in lacks the pabulum just like the food these little shops have on offer, and ignores the reality of these businesses. The store on the corner of my grandmother’s Brooklyn street has been fleecing folks ever since I could remember. There is no reason to charge eight dollars a pound for butter or four dollars for a pint of orange juice, except to make an indecent profit. How is it okay for many individual families to make money off the backs of the poor, when it is not okay for a large corporation to do the same? If it’s bad, no one should do it. Or if we really think capitalism is the state religion (no matter whom it exploits) then everyone should be able to do it with impunity.
Don’t even get me started on the low-end chain supermarkets. Rental fees for shopping carts, bring your own bag policies, turnstiles and bag checks, carts with seven-foot poles to monitor your progress through the store, alcohol prominently displayed in a front end-cap and everywhere else, plus low-quality heavily processed food. What “fresh” food there is, isn’t all that fresh. The fish smells fishy, the meat looks dicey, and the off-brand items come with ingredients that read like an eye chart. Forget health food sections, and organic, free-range choices. Those are out of the question.
Can you blame my Brooklyn cousins for running (or driving) five to six miles in New York City traffic to Trader Joe’s (Aldi’s upscale cousin), Sam’s Club, or Costco for better selections at better prices? Are they supposed to buy meat that’s gone off after watching another newsmagazine scandal on how the food is doused in bleach or whatever to make it more appealing for sale, just because some mom-and-pop are the ones ripping them off?
I find it ironic that folks who neither live nor shop in the ghetto are quick to protest the location of a Walmart, Supervalu or other non-union chain store in poor neighborhoods (Inglewood, the home to one or two food deserts, comes to mind, now that I live in California), but don’t boycott the similarly non-union stores (like Trader Joe’s) blithely taken for granted, particularly when many such stores have well-known, if unspoken, policies of not locating in the ghetto. (In the Los Angeles basin, somehow below West 3rd Street is that imaginary line in the sand).
I don’t live in a food desert because it’s no fun. During my brief life as a South L.A. resident, I resented having to travel so far and so long for reasonably fresh, organic, food items. Forget milk? It was a debate between nagging your neighbor (and we were all quite friendly), or making that half-hour (non-rush hour) drive to the closest store to get what you needed.
When I moved this last time, my first order of business was finding out how far a drive it was to a store with okay food – ten minutes – and how often there were local farmers’ markets – twice weekly. For those where “reasonable” home prices or low rent is paramount, these choices are not as well defined. So who would I be to criticize where they shop given a limited number of options?
Poor people mostly do the best they can, and who would I be to stand in the way of Walmart, if that’s the best for them.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
