A federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Isn't the real boogieman here rules (zoning, parking requirements, etc) and subsidies (oil industry) than mean we all live in diffuse single-use residential communities and have to have cars to get to work/school/shop, whether we really want them or not?
This seems to be missing the point, which has nothing to do with consumer preference. When Robinson-Patman was enforced, suppliers had to offer the same deal to all grocers, so prices were the same at the nearby stores. When it was no longer enforced, the big chains used their market power to extract special deals from suppliers, and thus, "Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers"
Sentences like this make me realize nobody writing about these problems has any actual experience in the grocery industry.
Grocery store margins are insanely thin. The relationship you have is backwards - suppliers and distributors have insane leverage over grocery stores. Massive brands essentially lease the aisle space from the stores. And stores have to stock the products consumers want because if they can't find the soda they like, they might never shop at that store again.
The only leverage grocery stores offer is volume pricing. Frito Lay would much rather move a truckload of product a day through a Safeway than drive around and stock tiny bodegas.
> The only leverage grocery stores offer is volume pricing.
This is directly contradicted by the article:
"Congressional hearings and a federal investigation found that A&P possessed an advantage that had nothing to do with greater efficiency, better service, or other legitimate ways of competing. Instead, A&P used its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it preferential treatment over smaller retailers. Fearful of losing their biggest customer, food manufacturers had no choice but to sell to A&P at substantially lower prices than they charged independent grocers—allowing A&P to further entrench its dominance."
"That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. It soon became notorious for aggressively strong-arming suppliers, a strategy that fueled its rapid expansion."
The A&P case was from the 1930s. It goes without saying that the grocery industry is a lot different today than it was. Robinson-Patman was a pretty obscure law, and it probably wouldn't have had much effect either way on preventing the rise of the supermarket chains despite much of the conjecture in this article.
But for most other supermarket chains, it's the suppliers that dictate the price. The stores essentially lease out their shelves directly to the distributors or manufacturers.
The law made it so no one had the position to squeeze suppliers for lower prices and as a result, consumers paid more for groceries. If the suppliers were shifting their costs unduly to small retailers, then there was a market for new suppliers. If retailers were a monopoly they would have raised prices, and that hasn't happened. The grocery market remains VERY competitive, with stores popping up and closing down all the time.
Huh? Where have you been the past few years?? The price of groceries has gone way up, and this might have even determined the outcome of the Presidential election.
where should these new suppliers come from? and how should they compete? by offering lower prices? how? farming has a cost that can only be lowered through massive scale. to get massive scale, suppliers need to sell to big chains where they face the same problems the existing suppliers already have.
Not quite. The law made it so that suppliers couldn't offer better deals to one of its customers over another. But retailers could still squeeze suppliers by going with another supplier if another supplier had better prices.
In other words, the law didn't make suppliers a monopoly, there was still competition between suppliers, it just prevented suppliers from shifting a disadvantage onto their smallest customers.
The article even tacitly admits the solution to the food desert problem is by... making groceries more expensive.
>The problem of food deserts will not be solved without the rediscovery of the Robinson-Patman Act. Requiring a level pricing playing field would restore local retailers’ ability to compete.
what needs to stop is the abuse of the dominant position of the large chains.
If black neighborhoods are underserved, go make a fortune in black neighborhood grocery stores or their suppliers.
If markets worked the way you are implying, then the problem would already be solved. In reality, the inefficiencies matter a lot.
Which is how big stores attract customers with lower prices, provided they already have cars to get to them.
A big central store is more economically efficient, and as a result the consumer preference, in an economic landscape where Men With Guns have removed every option except diffuse suburban housing, where they already need to have cars to get along.
Some suggest as a fix, getting the gunmen back out to force a more expensive, less efficient system for distributing food. I'm saying, can we strike at the root instead of forever hacking at the branches? Allow people to build the cities they actually want, so long as they don't hurt or endanger anyone else.
> Allow people to build the cities they actually want, so long as they don't hurt or endanger anyone else.
Keep following this thought experiment. There is plenty of vacant unincorporated land that a group of people could get together and build whatever city they might want. That scale of investment could even get some legal leeway from state government. The type of blank-slate freedom that you're idyllically invoking ("build the cities they actually want") actually exists right now.
The intrinsic problem is still that of social scaling. Cities need people, and those people will inevitably have conflicts (and these conflicts become more intense with residents' capital buy in - cf a building full of owned condominiums versus rented apartments). Cue you've just reinvented laws but are perhaps calling them by another name (eg "policies" "user agreement" etc).
And so sorry, there is no blanket "striking the root" answer here, just a lot of messy tradeoffs. If you think eliminating some type of regulation (eg minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, etc) might change consumer preferences to make neighborhood grocery stores viable again, you can argue for that! But recognize that you're arguing tradeoffs (eg denser buildings now mean more traffic, taller buildings mean the fire department needs higher ladders, existing properties lose access to sunlight, etc) rather than some imaginary null hypothesis of a blank slate where everything will be correct by construction.
This is just a big network affect failure. A bunch of zealots starting a cult in the desert isn't a city, and fails quickly every time.
> there is no blanket "striking the root" answer here
I didn't invent this. This is how the whole world worked, in general, 100 years ago. Japan already went back to this 30 years ago, and it absolutely worked.
> denser buildings now mean more traffic
But less need for cars when you can walk to where you are going. Also, public transit becomes a viable option at higher densities.
> existing properties lose access to sunlight
Exactly the NIMBY attitude that supposes you get to say what other people do with their property. This is what makes homes unaffordable, neighborhoods unwalkable, our working days full of commute time, the atmosphere full of CO2 and soot, and consolidates all sorts of commerce from the small and local into the national and international mega-corps. Great tradeoff!
What do you mean "just" ? The whole point is that the difficulty of social scaling is the network effects.
> I didn't invent this. This is how the whole world worked, in general, 100 years ago.
Sorry, you cannot reverse the arrow of time. From the little I understand the Japanese model is close to what I proposed about buying up land and creating a new urban area from scratch. So as I said, that is actually legally still on the table in the US. The problem is it seems to be off the table culturally (development companies in the US are building suburban tract houses instead of train stations and sky scrapers).
> But less need for cars when you can walk to where you are going
Yes, as I said, it's a tradeoff. I didn't explore all the facets. You're free to make these arguments. In fact, I encourage you to in general! I'm in a more ruralish area now and at this point in my life probably won't ever move back, but I used to live in a good sized walkable/bikeable city and I really enjoyed it (but for the economic treadmill).
> Exactly the NIMBY attitude that supposes you get to say what other people do with their property
Here we've gotten to the heart of the matter where so called right-libertarianism falls apart [0]. We're not talking about property (the buildings), but rather real estate (a land area relative to other people's real estate). That distinction exists for an important reason - because physical proximity means that your actions on your real estate does affect your neighbors, regardless of how much you want to ignore it. The retort of living next to a chemical plant is cliche, but for a good reason.
The null hypothesis base case is to move somewhere less dense so you don't affect your neighbors as much (which is precisely why the American conception of freedom encourages the sprawl it has!), not somehow having high population density without any conflict-resolving regulations. Scaling population density inherently requires social technology, not merely the rejection of social technology. If you're concerned about freedom in the urban context, you should be looking for freedom-preserving social technologies.
[0] just for context here I am libertarian, but have come to see right libertarianism as pathologically specious.
> What do you mean "just" ?
You've made the, "If you don't like the oppression here, move to Somalia" argument. If you don't like the way that cities are mismanaged, abandon them. We could also stop mismanaging them, as an alternative.
> From the little I understand the Japanese model is close to what I proposed about buying up land and creating a new urban area from scratch.
Japan had a king-hell housing crisis in the 1980s and solved it by liberalizing zoning and permitting, quashing NIMBY vetos, easing parking, setback and height requirements. Today in Tokyo, families earning median incomes can actually afford to own a home in Tokyo. That is something that can't be said of New York, LA, Boston, San Francisco, Paris, London, and to a growing degree, the middle sized cities across the US. Restrictions on land use drive up the price of housing. This should not be shocking. They also create a list of negative unintended consequences I already mentioned.
America creates new housing on the model of turning pasture and desert into tract-houses and strip malls, that has been known for decades to make things worse.
> So as I said, that is actually legally still on the table in the US.
"If you don't like the violent coercion that keeps poor people poor, you are free to move to the desert." But we already own houses in a city where no one can afford the rent. Why can't we replace the building on our land with one that is actually appropriate to people's needs? [0]
> not somehow having high population density without any conflict-resolving regulations.
...was never suggested. Merely liberalization.
[0] Actually I don't want to tear down my house, I just don't feel it is my business what my neighbors do with theirs. And the effects of imposing my will on their property seem very bad, indeed.
Errr, yes, this is a very valid critique. My argument was based on the assumptions you seemed to be coming from, which fit the same pattern of conjuring up new structures out of thin air:
>> If black neighborhoods are underserved, go make a fortune in black neighborhood grocery stores or their suppliers.
You then continued on about "men with guns" and willfully ignoring that actions on one piece of real estate can affect someone on another piece of real estate. All three are common tropes of right libertarianism.
Hence my:
> not somehow having high population density without any conflict-resolving regulations.
because I thought this is where you were coming from. But if you're really just arguing for "Merely liberalization", that's fantastic! Argue away, and you will get no argument from me on this topic (I don't live in a dense area, and I still recognize that the high cost of housing is strangling our society). But perhaps reformulate your arguments so they don't come off as dead end right libertarian tropes.
(Although I will say, completely independently of the rest of this exchange, and obviously not as a replacement for liberalization - if we could figure out a way to bootstrap new [non-car-based] cities in this country, that could go a long way as well)
We could fix these things by legislating big box stores, preventing effective collusion and hostile pricing, protecting smaller businesses with tax breaks, higher taxes on megacorps, and so forth. It is, in fact, possible, for megacorps to coexist with successful small businesses and this hostile and rank antagonism from big companies doesn't have to happen. They just lose out on .005% potential profit, so it's better to lobby for (and obtain) unchecked influence and dominion over American markets.
Community management and regulation plays a part, but food deserts represent a captured audience or market, so the primary goal is to shut down any possible "competition" no matter how little they actually impinge on profit, effectively disallowing competition. Throw in Amazon's racket, and the whole idea of an American "free marketplace" is more of a sick joke than any sort of principled reality.
You will buy your mass produced stuff from China and Nestle and Coke and Walmart, and you will like it. If you don't like it, good luck, because you've been priced out of leaving unless you're willing to be broke.
If the close store is the same price, then for sure, everyone will prefer what's nearby. If it is one hundred times the price (hyperbole) then everyone will take the drive. At some point of price differential is the current situation where people who are already forced to have cars will frequently take the drive for less expensive groceries. It's prima fascia the case.
The claim is that the large grocery chains are able to use their pricing power to demand prices that squeeze suppliers, keeping the difference for the grocer, not for the consumer. Their ability to do this has increased the more consolidated the grocery store chains have been allowed to become, giving them much more power versus their suppliers.
Grocery suppliers are, eg, agricultural producers who need to offload whole crops of perishable goods. The industry is full of well known market failures, examples of monopsony buying power, etc, so an argument from an idealized market I don't find very persuasive.
But Walmart is also a lot cheaper for Walmart. One delta is larger than the other.
Also, traveling to a store that's farther away isn't free. The trip has a marginal money cost and, more importantly, a time cost.
A significant cost savings.
But there are limits, people only drive so far. So once a big chain has driven everyone else out they can charge what they want or maximize profits by extracting value (see comment on Unsafeway).
Free market is good as long as monopolies can’t form. And unfortunately with local businesses that happens due to geographical constraints. We’ve seen it with groceries, next you’ll see it with plumbers (see all the massive PE roll ups going on now).
This was an eye opening article. I had no idea we already had a law on the books for this. It’s just…unenforced.
Restrictive single-use zoning makes this type of community effectively illegal, despite it being a big consumer choice winner in places where it is allowed.
Perhaps instead of a coercive fix for a problem caused by a coercive fix, we should strike at the root and allow people to buy what they want in the first place?
When I need something quickly I just pop by the nearest grocer, they also have a different variety than the larger one further away. If I need to buy some more expensive items then I know it's worth it to bike further away.
It's a good balance, I have options and both grocers seem to be doing fine (the independent one is even expanding, new freezers/fridges, opened a whole new section for cheese, etc.).
Even though it's a suburb it's quite compact, and well planned. There are some 3000 apartments around the station (walking distance no longer than 10 min), while I live further out closer to the forest and lake (about 20 min walking) in a town house, there are many other town houses and some 5-10 min away from me there are some villas. Population of this suburb is around 13-14k people.
On the one hand, haroldp is correct in that the automobile-centered infrastructure enables the coercion of people to travel farther to shop for groceries. But that point doesn't really contradict the article; this coercion is also enabled by the failure to enforce laws that are on the books. I'd argue that there are far, far too few independent groceries in Stockholm, for example, for reasons that have nothing to do with the transportation infrastructure and everything to do with the lack of effective antitrust legislation, or lack of enforcement (I actually don't know which it is).
Completely agree with you, there are far too few independent grocers and I make a point to shop at them to avoid only ending up at Coop/ICA/Hemköp/Willys. Also because my local independent grocer stocks very different products than the big chains, there's a lot of ethnic ingredients (Arabic, Ethiopian [including fresh injera], Korean, South American, and so on) that are entirely missing from the ICA Maxi close by. At least the one around me has found a good niche to compete.
When I moved to Sweden 10+ years ago a friend of mine told me his retirement plan was to save enough money to open a grocery store, I thought he was joking but he did that 2 years ago and it is actually quite profitable to be a Hemköp franchisee...
The small, corner grocery store back in the day didn't have much selection though. Hence the takeover of super-markets.
For better and worse, their role has mostly been supplanted by gas stations and dollar stores which still populate a lot of these food deserts.
How did you read the article and come to that conclusion? Small towns and poor neighborhoods all had grocery stores, and competed fine with supermarkets, until Robinson-Patman stopped being enforced.
It really peeves me I didn't notice this sooner because I'm usually pretty good at identifying bullshit tropes that are really just the middle class fishing for reasons to feel superior and the idea that the poors are getting screwed at the dollar stores one just flew right by because I never shopped much at a dollar store until one opened near me.
Further subdivision is only useful in some contexts.
It's usually ill-advised to propose a magic bullet when there are many factors at play in the overall economics. I haven't seen any data suggesting the unenforcement (which has no visibility) was more impactful than the S&L crisis (which happened around the same time).
1973 to 1982 Stagflation raged. 1970s took the USD into fiat currency,early 1980s the collapse of Silver occurred due to bad actors cornering markets, certain banks also started being less responsible with whom they loaned to favoring large corporations over independent businesses, and heavy speculation regardless of risk that culminated in the savings and loan crisis affecting many industries, and seemingly following the all too familiar pattern of too-big-to-fail bailout type plans, which were proven to be profitable starting with the Pennsylvania Railroad bankruptcy in 1970 (from what I've seen).
While it is an interesting synopsis, the article completely ignores the other factors instead cherrypicking antitrust, more specifically the Patman Act and unenforcement as the culprit. Economies don't operate in a vacuum. Occam's razor says its more likely to be any number of the crises that happened with the underlying trend being fiat banking, than any other factor that has almost no visibility with a lot of other confounding data. They were chaotic times.
Growing up in the UK my family used to drive 15-20 mins to the supermarket and do a big weekly or monthly shop. The nearest _decent_ non-petrol-station style shop with actual food would have been an hours' walk.
In the US unless you actually live in the absolute middle of nowhere like rural rural you're not more than 20 miles from a supermarket. Map example - everywhere other than the darkest red colour is a 15-20 min drive:
https://imgur.com/distance-to-nearest-large-supermarket-usa-...
Basically almost anywhere that has any meaningful population at all you're sub 20 mins drive. Of course there's not much in rural areas, that's what rural means.
There seems to be a focus on whether you "need" a car which has always seemed silly to me. If you don't have a car in the USA, outside of somewhere like NYC or specific metro corridors, you are going to have a significantly limited life in so many ways that having to drive to the supermarket just seems like a triviality in comparison.
Even in Britain people just like, have cars, it's normal, if you don't then outside of London it's just kind of embarrassing.
The whole thing seems like someone just wants an excuse to be provocative, just like, go to the supermarket, it's not that deep.
"If you don't have a car ... you are going to have a significantly limited life in so many ways that having to drive to the supermarket just seems like a triviality in comparison." Except that everyone needs to eat, and we know that a poor diet can lead to many, many bad health outcomes. You're correct that there are other disadvantages, such as access to employment opportunities. But if you didn't live in a food desert, you could get a job at the grocery store, right?
"people just like, have cars, it's normal" Except that owning (or leasing) a car is a significant, ongoing expense. I barely use mine (<1,000 miles per year) and it still costs me $2k in insurance, registration, and maintenance. Some people just can't afford that. And what if you are young, old, or are unable to drive for any reason?
Everyone needs to have a life, to have a life in the United States outside of a few very specific areas requires a member of your family to have a car.
> I barely use mine (<1,000 miles per year)
Right, so you obviously don't live in a food desert, presumably you're in NYC or San Francisco or the DC area or some other place where you can just use the metro for everything, this is not the case in the vast majority of the US, it's not even the case in most of Britain or Europe.
My grandma has to walk 15 minutes to get to her nearest food shop, one day she won't be able to make that walk, does she live in a food desert? No, she's just old, we'll help her out!
I'm in the US, which can be pretty sparse even in urban areas if they were designed with particular bulk transit in mind. We have an industrial site that several hundred people need to report to over a 12 hour period, some temporarily, some for the entire duration. There's no parking and it's surrounded by multilane roads, now, so without bussing, no one can enter or leave except on a particular schedule, which hasn't been aligning to their personal schedules, so they can't necessarily get back to their cars to get access to food that may exist half a mile away in an otherwise urban area. There are no food trucks, and there's no food delivery.
If you're there, there's no convenient way to eat anything you didn't bring. The city took a look and now classifies it as a food desert, so they have to fix it.
Other types of food deserts are named as an indicator of poverty. In my home town, there was one grocery store and only a few diners. Once the commuter rail ended, about a third of the population (largely plant and mill workers) could only access that that part of town if they had a vehicle that could take the highway. A formerly 10 minute trip by rail and foot suddenly took three or four times as long and required a car! With how many single car households there were, people lost access to convenient food and eventually formed their own town.
Something similar happened when the bus routes were changed in another city I lived in, intentionally. It was part of a "beautification" scheme to create a false impression of wealth and demographics in a bid to attract investors, and they thought manufacturing a food desert would keep people out. The first year, some elderly people on fixed income died trying to make the trip by foot in the heat or were hit by cars, and the city was sued to reinstate transport.
Probably it is most similar to Instacart/Amazon Grocery delivery but the issue with these is that they are more oriented toward high value, high convenience, high immediacy, highly customizable orders for groceries items.
The flip side would be a set time (i.e. Saturday or Sunday), a set location (i.e. local school parking lot), a set number of bulk items (i.e. eggs, bread, pasta, chicken legs, ground beef, milk).
Call around your local distributors and ask if they'll work with a food buyers club.
I'm going to need more meat than this. Was there a memo that went out detailing that this statutory law will no longer be enforced? Did no succeeding FTC Chair or Attorney General think to pick up the torch?
One day things change and they start getting enforced again, now you're a criminal.
This combined with the 13th amendment making slavery legal for prisoners enables the US to grow or shrink its pool of available slave workers using primarily political forces.
It additionally empowers politicians with effective judicial power they would otherwise not have. Consider, for instance, Giuliani's use of NYC's antiquated cabaret laws to "clean up" the city.
I wonder if enterprise pricing by software vendors and negotiated pricing between payers and providers violate the act.
Alas, I don't remember what specific thing they were discussing.
I'd like to think the article left out some important context that I'm now missing, because it'd sure be a weird thing to complain about from a partisan perspective if it could have been solved with the stroke of a pen.
If Democrats didn't adopt a more pro-business face, would there even be a democrat party anymore?
People seem to want democrats to do what FDR did. FDR's democrats held like a 70% control in the Senate! He was able to cow the supreme court because he had a credible threat to actually pack the court, like, according to the actual rules.
As long as party majority leader is not a democrat for example, you cannot guarantee any judge actually gets their appointment voted on. Yet young democrats are dissatisfied with democrats "letting" McConnell steal the appointments.
Want democrats to do something? You have to give them the power to do so!
I think that thinking of it this way shifts the blame unduly; it's not like Republicans as well as Democrats don't bear the blame for continuing harmful policies, just because those policies were instituted by Republicans. As to Democrats, the first Democratic administration that was elected after Reagan did so by running away from many traditional Democratic priorities, and both other Democratic administrations had to deal with a recalcitrant Congress for at least a substantial portion of their time in office.
Even if they hadn't, though, I think that the general fact is that it's much easier to create problems quickly than to fix them quickly, so that the idea that any administration, even a 2-term one with a hypothetical cooperative Congress, could undo such changes (as opposed to just starting to undo them) isn't plausible—or, if it could be done, then it would surely be as all-consuming of political capital as the ACA was, at the expense of pursuing any of that administration's other priorities—and being able to pursue a longer-term solution would require electoral patience with political promises that weren't accompanied by immediate delivery.
It only takes a few years or even months of Republican rule to install judges that will deem any regulations unconstitutional, to allow time-bounded authorizations to lapse, to fire large numbers of public servants who keep the administrative state running, or simply to use the bully pulpit to tarnish the reputation of federal bureaucracy so that individuals will refuse to interact with them. Building those institutions as credible, competent forces takes somewhere between years and lifetimes.
They had 72 Days in 2009 to fix everything! Both parties are the same! /s
The Republicans keep doing it... Lieberman, Nelson, Manchin, Sinema, et al.
The Democrats on the other hand are beholden to corporate interests which limits how far left they can go.
Republicans have not had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate since 1907.
Meanwhile the Democrats have to spend every term fixing the things the GOP broke, only for voters to reward them by saying "you didn't fix everything and this dude promises the magical tax fairy will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" and restoring to power the party that breaks everything and raises the deficit.
Things are NOT the same with both parties, and discussing the systemic issues both with the electoral college, the Senate - a body so undemocratic that the Supreme Court has literally ruled it unconstitutional for any state to have a legislative body with membership based on land instead of population[2], as well as the fact that it's much easier and faster to tear things down than to build them up - is not "making excuses". It's trying to educate people, despite the fact that a significant chunk of them don't want to understand how things work, they want to act on feelings.
[1]: https://www.nationaljournal.com/member/magazine/top-gop-prio...
Which is, by design in the American system, not possible without strict control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate, and possibly the Supreme Court.
As long as voters continue to not vote for democrats for "not doing enough", the democrats will never be able to "do enough". That's inherent in the system! Republican voters meanwhile understand the concept of "I'm going to put them in charge and see what they end up doing", even if I disagree with the things they want and their methods, they understand democracy very well!
Like NAFTA.
When it comes to making people lives worse the democrats are just as capable as the republicans.
It's just that when it comes to helping people. Oh no. Woe is us we can't do anything with the presidency, and a super majority in every branch of government.
This happens once every 20 years.
But democratic cultists always come out of the wood work to explain why this is actually ~Reagans~ ~Bushs~ ~Bush2s~ Trumps fault.
The truth is that neither Democrats nor Republicans want to solve the problems of the working class and the poor, because both parties are financed by the wealthy.
The 1980s was a huge inflection point for our economy overall. It was the beginning of the baby boom. The end of Bretton Woods was just being felt. Instantaneous international markets were a thing for the first time.
You can pull as many threads as you want to make the case that it all points to the minutia of a single administration - but they just happened to be at the wheel when the tide was changing.
Which baby boom are you talking about?
The baby boom was 50s and 60s, so late 80s is when they started working and consuming things.
Isn't this the real issue? That we build on the assumption that everyone has a car?
I think other factors are at play, namely crime, and the perception of crime. South Atlanta is a food desert yet a lot of people live there, people who can afford to buy at Aldi's and Lidl.
There is bias but I hesitate to name that bias because I think its a multitude of incorrect thinking.
Bad or good for consumers?
Does it matter if you need to drive 8 or 11 miles (non-desert vs. desert) to buy boxed cereals and processed food?
CostCo rides the same dynamic, at scale. CostCo deserts?
Want to fix it, HN-style? Create a startup! But more regulation? Ffs.
A startup that delivers groceries? Interesting idea...
> Low access is characterized by at least 500 people and/or 33 percent of the tract population residing more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery in urban areas, and more than 10 miles in rural areas
(source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45014/30940_er... )
Interestingly enough, this is measured by the euclidian distance, not by the actual number of miles required to travel.
Obviously it's initially good for consumers. Then, once competition is eliminated, it gets worse.
Unrestrained capitalism creates monopolies and those 3 presidents created an environment for monopolies to flourish.
Reagan started things off by deregulating businesses and rewarding big business for "efficiency". Which really just translated into big businesses buying out the competition and jacking up the prices.
Clinton continued a trend primarily by dismantling and privatizing the federal government. That lead to giant Quazi-government businesses that have little to no competition and ultimately bring the worst of all worlds. The rollout of the ACA marketplaces is a prime example of what that capture looks like, a sub sub sub sub sub contracted and ultimately outsourced project that was riddled with bugs costing millions to create when literally if the fed gov had a team of software devs employed (perhaps some of the devs from the DOD?) it would have cost far less and would have actually worked.
Bush then caused a crisis in funding by dishing out huge tax cuts. Those tax cuts (especially around capital gains) essentially encouraged the hording of wealth while simultaneously with Clinton's privatization of social programs caused a crisis in the federal budget. Couple that with 2 giant boondoggle wars where we effectively dumped trillions of dollars into defense companies to later abandon our purchases in the desert. Defense companies, I might add, that shouldn't exist as their only client is the US government. Why should we be funding 4 or 5 companies to build weapons for the US military? Why can't the US military build its own weapons? Why should we be purchasing wasted tanks with generals literally begging the US government to stop buying equipment? I would much rather that money go to something like UBI, food stamps, or SS/Medicare instead of being the most inefficient way to make jobs. Heck, we could dump that money into free public education and R&D to make sure we aren't falling behind technically without producing weapons that will sit unused.
You are probably overlooking a lot of complexity in the ACA marketplace software. It needed to exchange information with a bunch of different state systems and the systems of several different federal agencies, and most of those systems had not been designed to exchange information with systems outside of their state or agency.