Supermarkets and Social Justice

Albertsons has announced that it is closing stores in San Francisco. So what do San Franciscans do? Need you ask?  Protest, of course!

A group of toddlers stood holding signs in front of the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Monday asking residents to help keep their neighborhood grocery stores open.

The children, with their parents, stood protesting at the future home of a Bristol Farms, a high-end supermarket with ties to Albertsons. Five of The City’s 28 major grocery stores have shut down in the last year, leaving some neighborhoods without a market to buy fresh produce, meat or dairy products.

The workers' union says the stores are being closed because they don't fit the template of mega-stores that are favored by supermarket owners:

Ron Lind, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 428, which represents the employees of 13 of the Bay Area Albertsons stores scheduled to shut down in August, said the company is closing the older stores that do not “meet the model of the new 50,000-square-foot stores” that most major grocers want to build.

Not so, says Albertsons:

 Quyen Ha of Albertsons said the decision is purely based on economics.

“When we kind of took a step back and looked at our entire profile of stores, it was that they represented 22 percent of stores but only bring in 12 percent of sales,” she said. “That was the major reason why.”

This isn't good enough for the activists.  People have a right to have a supermarket in their neighborhood.  Even if its operated at a loss:

“How will we get them to understand they cannot just up and close the Albertsons that means so much to everybody,” said Giselle Quezada, a resident who lives near the store.

Many residents are elderly or low-income and cannot afford to travel close to three miles to the closest supermarket, according to Quezada. At a rally on Monday, residents asked for Albertsons to help shuttle residents to the new store.

Hear that, Albertsons?  It doesn't matter if a store is a drag on your profits. You have a moral obligation to serve the community!  And you better not try to wiggle out of it or we'll sic the politicians on you:

In June, Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval pushed a measure through the Board of Supervisors to ask Albertsons to stay open or find a replacement store.

(Yes, the very same Gerardo Sandoval who told Sean Hannity  "I don't think we should have a military. Absolutely.")

The profit margin in the grocery business is razor-thin at best and getting thinner with competition from Wal-Mart at the low end and Molly Stone's and Whole Foods at the high end.  The reasons Ron Lind and Quyen Ha posed for the store closures aren't necessarily opposed. The only way a supermarket can stay in business is for it to increase its prices  or its volume.  It's the stores in the middle that are getting killed.

If the Board of Supervisors is serious about keeping supermarkets in the neighborhoods, it should make the business climate friendlier for them to operate, instead of heaping on new taxes. Sooner or later, Supervisor Aaron Peskin's tax 'em to the hilt policies will kill the goose that lays the golden egg.  But, until then it's easier to oppose Albertson's for closing stores while simultaneously making it harder for it to operate.