'Power to communities': Chicago considers city-owned grocery store to address 'food deserts' after giants like Walmart and Whole Foods shutter stores
'Power to communities': Chicago considers city-owned grocery store to address 'food deserts' after giants like Walmart and Whole Foods shutter stores
finance.yahoo.com
'Power to communities': Chicago considers city-owned grocery store to address 'food deserts' after giants like Walmart and Whole Foods shutter stores
The mayor’s office says it would be the first major U.S. city to enact such a plan.
It’s funny how the solutions for the failures of capitalism often end up looking just like socialism
Almost like a society of individuals that only care about themselves won't last long...
About 3% of humans are born psychpaths (roughly: they have no empathy hence only care about themselves).
One would naivelly expect that only caring about yourself would be a winning strategy from a genetics point of view and hence over time the whole of Manking would have become psychopaths as the ones with such a natural advantage were more successful at surviving and reproducing than the others, yet that's not at all the case and only a small fraction of people are born psychopaths.
My personal explanation for that is that psychopathic behaviour is only a genetic advantage if most people around are not that - or, transposed to to economic terms, being a rent-seeker only works if most people are producers and doens't at all work when most people are rent-seekers.
I expect that in our evolutionary past, whenever a tribe/group had too many psychopaths without some kind of mechanism to kick them out or force them into cooperative mode, it eventually collapsed and ended up removed from the genetic pool hence why in millions of years of evolution the supposed superior behaviour of caring only about yourself didn't end up dominating the human genetic pool - the "threading of the needle" for the survival psychopathy as a behavioural trait in the gene pool was a balance between that behaviour expressing itself often enough to reproduce and remain in the gene pool and not so much that there were too many such individuals in a group causing it to collapse.
Are they closed because of rampant theft?
As other people have pointed out, big companies target an area and set about establishing a monopoly using $$$
Then they realise “huh. There’s not so much profit here in Assfuck, Montana after all.” And make some lame excuse (theft) to pull out.
Citizens get fucked because : capitalism.
That has essentially never happened, that's just a fraudulent PR campaign
Yes really
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/retailers-talk-a-lot-about-rising-theft-but-a-retail-industry-report-finds-a-key-metric-for-it-hasnt-increased-that-much-b24ee181
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/claims-about-organized-retail-theft-are-nearly-impossible-to-verify.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/shoplifting-holiday-theft-panic/621108/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5ve49/we-cried-too-much-walgreens-cfo-admits-retail-theft-isnt-the-crisis-it-portrayed
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-12-15/organized-retail-theft-crime-rate
https://news.wttw.com/2023/05/12/retailers-walmart-and-starbucks-are-closing-big-cities-some-cite-crime-changing-habits
Wage theft.
Doesn't look like socialism to me. Buiseness being city-owned isn't enough.
The crime stories (yep, they made a big buzz and media ran hundreds of stories about that one shoplifter in San Francisco) wildly overstated the actual amount of crime. It's just so interesting that corporate news oversold that story, so much so that a person that didn't know better would think that was a pervasive thing in urban areas and cities are all hellscapes of disorder and flames.
Meanwhile, shareholders rewarded Walgreens' management with a boost to stock prices after they reported they'd be pulling out of 'crime-ridden' areas. They didn't leave because of the crime, they left for the stock bump and told the crime story to make it look less-bad
By definition, if the business venture isn't profitable, then there isn't a market.
REI in downtown Portland pulled out and publicly said it was because of rising crime, but it was really because the employees were trying to unionize.
Yeah. We all know how much Walmart is struggling to make profits.
Invoking crime for this practice is just a tactic to pretend it isn't red lining.
Is city ownership socialist though? Are the workers unionized? Do they have the right to decide what is and isn't stocked?
Not necessarily. That would turn it into something more like a public utility than like a for-profit business.
I mean, it's "not socialism" when the fire department or the power utility aren't private, for-profit corporations, but it is if the grocery store is? LOL
The stores all closed down due to high crime rate, I don't blame them.
This is true. I don’t know why you’re being downvoted.