from Hacker News

The Gov't Spends Millions on Grocery Stores in Food Deserts–Many Don't Survive

by jyunwai on 8/9/24, 1:30 PM with 3 comments

• by everybodyknows on 8/9/24, 2:50 PM

  > Eager to fill a void in this one-restaurant town, the co-op board members opened an adjacent cafe that sold hot pizza, fried chicken and sides. But it didn’t bring in customers like they’d hoped and bled thousands of dollars instead, forcing its closure in October. It also drained what savings the store had.

  Incompetent management, all the way to the top: taxpayer-provided capital blown on non-core vanity project.

  > Around the same time, the walk-in cooler that the store had purchased secondhand to save money broke, taking with it about $2,000 worth of meat, produce and dairy products it contained. Without the cooler, the store could keep only about 16 gallons of milk on its shelves — a major issue since milk is a key product that brings people into grocery stores.

  > The store leadership started a GoFundMe, but it raised only about $1,600, a fraction of the $55,000 sought to help replace the cooler and other equipment as well as to restock the store.

  Capital reserve gone, management had no way to deal with the inevitable.

• by b3ing on 8/9/24, 1:40 PM

  Prices played a big part, but also people went back to their regular places.

  I wonder if people just being trained to eat processed garbage is also a thing. Even the National Nutritional guidelines sold out to lobbying and put Dairy in their recommendations, whereas Canada which had a similar guideline excluded Dairy entirely.

• by RecycledEle on 8/10/24, 3:17 PM

  Let the free market decide.

  If people want a grocery stor or restaurant, one will appear.

  If people tolerate criminals that destroy businesses, the businesses will go away and the people will suffer. This is as it should be.