It appears that whenever you find something that afflicts society, 9 times out
of 10, it goes back to the Reagan administration.
Case in point,
food deserts, where large areas of poorer urban neighborhoods are underserved by grocery
stores, requiring either long trips to get inexpensive and healthy food, or
that they get expensive unhealthy food from local convenience stores and the
like.
The concept of the food desert has been around long enough that it
feels almost like a fact of nature. Tens of millions of Americans live in
low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the
general
consensus is
that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a
supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate
sufficient spending on groceries, or they can’t overcome a racist pattern of
corporate redlining.
But these explanations fail to contend with a
key fact: Although poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, food
deserts arrived only around the late 1980s. Prior to that, small towns and
poor neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store, perhaps
even several. (The term food desert was
coined in 1995
by a task force studying what was then a relatively new phenomenon.)
The high-poverty, majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is
typical of the trend. In the 1960s, the area had more than half a dozen
grocery stores, according to a
study
by the anthropologist Ashanté Reese. These included a branch of the local
District Grocery Stores co-op, a Safeway supermarket, and independent
Black-owned businesses such as Tip Top Grocery on Sheriff Road. By the 1990s,
however, the number of grocery stores in Deanwood had dwindled to just two,
and today the neighborhood has none.
………
Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population
density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason.
Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the
1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their
efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out
grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away
until that mistake is reversed.
………
Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law
essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to
offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them. It does, however,
allow businesses to pass along legitimate savings. If it truly costs less to
sell a product by the truckload rather than by the case, for example, then
suppliers can adjust their prices accordingly—just so long as every retailer
who buys by the truckload gets the same discount.
For the next four
decades, Robinson-Patman was a staple of the Federal Trade Commission’s
enforcement agenda. From 1952 to 1964, for example, the agency issued 81
formal complaints to block grocery suppliers from giving large supermarket
chains better prices on milk, oatmeal, pasta, cookies, and other items than
they offered to smaller grocers. Most of these complaints were resolved when
suppliers agreed to eliminate the price discrimination. Occasionally a case
went to court.
During the decades when Robinson-Patman was
enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the
grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for
shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the
eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That
statistic was virtually
identical
in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for
decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery
shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and
small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly
traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway.
………
Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust
enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set
about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the
new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small
businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it.
………
Why didn’t large chains fill the void when local stores closed? They didn’t
need to. In the 1960s, if a chain like Safeway wanted to compete for the
grocery dollars spent by Deanwood residents, it had to open a store in the
neighborhood. But once the independent stores closed, the chains no longer had
to invest in low-income areas. They could count on people to schlep across
town to their other locations. Today, in fact, many Deanwood residents travel
to a Safeway outside the neighborhood to shop. This particular Safeway has had
such
persistent issues
with expired meat and rotting produce that some locals have taken to calling
it the “UnSafeway.” Yet, without alternatives, people keep shopping
there.
Yet another example of how Ronald Reagan's enforcing Robert Bork's corrupt theory of antitrust ruined the United States.
For America to be "Great Again" we need aggressive antitrust, and this includes not just standard antitrust enforcement, but a rollback of the scope of policies that deliberately enhance monopoly powers, like patent and copyright.
Initial unemployment claims fell more than forecast, but continuing claims rose to a 3 year high.
