Why we need public grocery stores
By Nikhil P
The Atlanta DSA Medium is a collection of individual member op-eds, educational blogs, and other thoughts from the Left. Opinions expressed on our Medium are those of the author only.
On the day of writing this piece, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen by nearly 1%. Not a catastrophic amount, but a considerable number. But what was the cause? Was it a natural disaster? Did a major corporation or sector show profit declines? No. The cause was President Joe Biden talking about raising the capital gains tax.
The phrase “capital flight” occurs in a lot of discussions whenever we talk about policies that improve the rights of workers, enhance protections for consumers, or demand accountability and taxation for the rich. What it means is capitalists, in retribution to policies or organizing they don’t like, taking a large chunk of the system down with them and moving their capital elsewhere.
We see this most commonly, and with highest impact, in the retail sector. In February, after workers in Long Beach, California successfully fought for the city government to enact a hazard pay law, Kroger closed down its stores in the city, resulting in their employees losing their jobs and the people of the community losing access to their stores. While these actions cause companies like Kroger to lose out on revenue from these stores, it is a strategy built on deterring future workers from organizing and enacting policy that gets in the way of profits.
Lack of access to affordable groceries is a major problem in Atlanta. The USDA has identified at least 35 food deserts within the Atlanta Perimeter. Our capitalist food distribution system is clearly not functioning for working class families.
It’s situations like this where we need to expand and strengthen public, community-decided control of our economy. Public grocery stores are an immediate path for us to provide universal, democratically-run services. They are also a way to improve worker’s rights and provide reliable, stable jobs. Historically, the public sector has been an important vehicle towards bringing people from black and hispanic communities out of poverty.
We don’t have to start from scratch. As we encourage workers to unionize, and we strengthen worker’s protections, capitalist firms like Walmart and Kroger will undoubtedly threaten to close down their stores in retaliation. To call them on this bluff, we must give local governments the authority to purchase and run any store under their jurisdiction that closes.
In these cases, all the pieces are already there and connected together. The physical store is present, as is all its equipment. The same workers can stay, under higher wages and better benefits. The actual producers of food and other supplies don’t need to change either, nor does the logistics sector that delivers them. And being the owners, the city does not need to pay the property taxes that a private firm might.
Despite these facts, many people are convinced that publicly run services are inherently less efficient and lower quality than their private counterparts. Decades of Cold War era propaganda has convinced much of America that central planning from a public agency is inferior to the “free market” of capitalism. But when we actually look at the reality of how chains like Walmart are run, we see that central planning is a core component of their business model. Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, authors of The People’s Republic of Walmart, describe Walmart’s practices as such:
Walmart’s planning extends beyond its four walls. Commerce scholars and operations research analysts attribute the success of Walmart’s logistical marvel to being among the first to adopt innovations such as continuous replacement; vendor-managed inventory; computerization; and trust, openness, cooperation, and transparency of information all along the supply chain.
Central planning is already the name of the game for most large and profitable corporations. But under a public sector control, we can make this system truly democratic. Instead of having workers face starvation wages, we can ensure they have fair and dignified conditions and compensation. And instead of just placing stores in places that are profitable, and moving them out when that’s no longer the case, we can plan the placement of grocery stores to ensure that all communities in Atlanta have affordable and healthy food available.
While public ownership has become a scary concept to many Americans after decades of neoliberal propaganda, we’ve seen that the conditions of modern capitalism have forced even conservative towns to start deploying public grocery stores as an option. At the start of the COVID pandemic, this store played a key role in making sure the residents of Baldwin, Florida, had access to necessities during nationwide shortages. If a town like Baldwin with only 1,600 residents can achieve a public service like this, there’s no reason we can’t implement it in Atlanta.
