Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation. — “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg
I doubt whether Carl Sandburg envisioned his “City of Big Shoulders” becoming managers of grocery stores. But that’s what Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson is contemplating.
National Review’s Jim Geraghty pulled no punches. “The city of Chicago — already doing such a terrific job on handling crime, poverty, homelessness, and unemployment — is exploring the possibility of establishing municipally owned grocery stores.”
It could be that Johnson has given up on solving those other problems and has decided to dig into that manure pile looking for the pony. I doubt whether he’ll find it.
“All Chicagoans deserve to live near convenient, affordable, healthy grocery options,” Johnson said in a statement. “We know access to grocery stores is already a challenge for many residents, especially on the South and West sides… I am proud to work alongside partners to take this step in envisioning what a municipally owned grocery store in Chicago could look like.”
One of his partners in this madcap scheme is the Economic Security Project. This national non-profit organization has been tasked with developing feasibility studies to create a plan to open a grocery store on the South or West Sides. It’s going to be a challenge. Six grocery stores have closed in the last two years, including four Walmart stores
Geraghty again:
Now, no doubt Chicago’s city-run grocery stores would have the same service, efficiency, and quality that Chicago residents have come to expect from the local government of a city ranked 149th in its financial stability, 67th in its education system, 71st in its health-care system, 80th in its public safety, 129th in the quality of its economy, or, credit where it’s due, 37th in its infrastructure and pollution. (That’s out of 149 U.S. cities.)
And grocery stores are not exempt from the problems associated with running a retail outfit in high-crime neighborhoods. Walmart was extremely careful in announcing the closing of their stores, citing “unprofitability,”
“The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago — these stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years,” Walmart said in a statement.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported this past summer that “Grocery operators have pointed to crime and homelessness as reasons they’ve needed to invest more in security, driving up costs, according to Amanda Lai, a Chicago director of food industry practice for the consulting firm McMillan Doolittle. These grocers also deal with hefty overhead costs in cities.”
But residents and activists were enraged that Walmart would leave their crime-ridden neighborhoods. In fact, the writing was on the wall following the massive looting and rioting during the George Floyd unrest. The shoplifting had become out of control, and it had reached a point where the stores were losing tens of millions of dollars a year.
And now Mayor Johnson wants to open a government-run grocery store? How’d that work out for the old Soviet Union?
It just doesn’t compute, especially when you consider the actual experience of state-run supermarkets, which was dismal at best, and disastrous at worst, as stores in the old Soviet Union would stock caviar but fail to provide basic staples. As CATO Institute’s Scott Lincicome reminded us, last week was the 34th anniversary of Boris Yeltsin’s famous visit to a Texas supermarket in 1989 after checking out NASA’s control center in Houston. Yeltsin would later preside over the end of the Soviet Union but at that point, he was a proud, newly elected member of the Supreme Soviet.
Yet he was simply gobsmacked by the sheer abundance and variety of stuff on the shelves, so much so that told his aides, “We have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” One of his aides said “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” in Yeltsin as a result. As winter draws near, Windy City residents can comfort themselves by remembering that history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.
Johnson should give it a rest. Work on some of the other critical problems like crime and homelessness before starting a new project destined to fail.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member