Ghetto Food Deserts

Mon, Jan 6, 2:50 PM (6 days ago)

Hey James!

Here is an interesting analysis of why there is a dearth of grocery stores in ghettoized urban centres:

Essentially, it complements Ghetto Grocer but fails to mention theft as an underlining cause.

Thoughts?

Best always,

Ken

According to this article, it is competition that has killed the supermarket and the victims are Yutish tribesmen of the benighted inner cities.

On this I will speak authoritatively as a man who actually setup one store, and reset two stores, which thrived for over five years each, in the exact locations which previously failed to support numerous versions of the supermarket model.

First, competition factors which drive supermarket failure are a matter of adaptability, with less adaptable models—meaning chains—failing at a higher rate. The big killers of adaptability, are, in order of importance:

#1 Lack of buying power. Lower buying power makes one less competitive in a low income urban market.

#2 Buying Power. Buying power means the more stores you have the cheaper you buy, which means, that as your buying power increases your adaptability decreases.

Numbers 1 and 2 are the leading causes of supermarket death. #3 below is the factor that might balance the two big dogs of retail food.

#3 Quality staff. Most staff is drawn from within 2 miles of the location, with only management travelling to work. Locating in a high crime area means low quality staff at the low and mid level and flight of high quality staff due to crimes against them. You can have the best cake decorator on the planet, but after she is raped on the parking lot by Yutish warriors at 4 AM or beaten up by a Yutish amazon at 4 PM for misspelling Wankeeshiace on a $120 food stampable birthday cake, she is going to find employment elsewhere, and she can, because she is the best.

#4 Walmart and Target on the low end killing you on brand loyalty prices, like Tide and Hellman's mayo.

#5 Wegman's and Whole Foods and gourmet grocers taking away your high end sales, like $10 bottles of sauce and gourmet meats and produce.

#6 Box stores and dollar stores chopping into your easily handled items, such as caned goods and paper products.

The most important factor above is #3. Do you have safe work conditions for key staff and access to general staffing from a hard working and high trust labor pool?

If you do not, in other words, if you are located in the ghetto, than your ability to deal with 1-2 and 4-6 is compromised and your ability to deal with the big location-based stresses below is all but crippled.

Now, having looked at internal system failure and external competitive stress, lets look at what such a struggling organization runs into on the ground. Keep in mind that the supermarket was designed to crush specialized competitors like dollar stores and butcher shops. The layout is ultimate high trust on a large scale, a mass version of a roadside pie stand where buyers leave money for the baker with full confidence that no passer by will steal the money. Grover stores are impossible to defend. The dollar store deals with this buy not stocking theft-worthy items.

From greatest to least, what kills a ghetto grocery store is:

#1 Back door employee theft on a large scale, like my seafood manager dyke bitch sending out cases of crabmeat and shrimp in trash cans moved by her janitor/accomplice to be resold at bars.

#2 Front door employee theft on small scale.

#4 Looting by outsiders, brazen pillaging—which began in 2015 in Baltimore and is no nation wide.

#5 Security staffing expenses

#6 Shoplifting

#7 Loss of impulse sales due to security-based merchandising

#8 Loss of gourmet sales due to loss of high end clients afraid of crime

#9 Increased staffing needs due to loss of economy of scale, with more small orders bought by each household adult and teen shopping on their own, instead of most sales being picked up in a large weekly order by a mother, which was the traditional core of the supermarket design, almost totally absent in the ghetto, which has minimal family structure. So this number 9 is always there, eating away at your staffing flexibility and potential by the very fact that the supermarket was developed to serve a family which bought one big order a week in the morning or afternoon and two small orders in the early evening. Now, in the ghetto, with no family structure, you see one big order a month, which has a lot of shrink attached to it [such as lost sales from suddenly depleted inventory], and 5 small orders a week, mostly after dark, when staffing is more dangerous and more expensive.

#10 Law suits triple in low trust areas. This can rate as #10 or #0 depending on who decides to sue you and how often, including staff and customers.

#11 Direct crime impacts like robbery, insurance hikes and workman's compensation for injuries suffered being attacked by criminals on the job, can go from #11 to #-1, again, depending on fickle Fortune, slut that she is.

Conclusion, the article writers never operated a retail food outlet anywhere, least of all the ghetto. The death of the supermarket is the extinction of our highest trust public space, and would signal the same cultural level of dissolution that the abandonment of an ancient Hellenic agora in an ethnic polis would, in exchange for a Roman gladiatorial arena.

Thanks, Ken.