Why Whole Foods Is Moving in to One of the Poorest Neighborhoods in Chicago | Hacker News Reader

Why Whole Foods Is Moving in to One of the Poorest Neighborhoods in Chicago

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117 pointsadam96 comments

I've lived in Englewood. I can confirm a lack of quality produce - I'd have to travel to Hyde Park, Chinatown or the South Loop for that. However, I doubt Whole Foods will draw too many neighborhood customers away from the Food-4-Less or Aldi. Price matters.

The Englewood location is probably more about cheap land near the I-90/94, which links downtown Chicago to the South Side, and south suburbs. This location is also close to the Hyde Park (University of Chicago) and Woodlawn neighborhoods, which are more affluent.

Would you consider Aldi's to not be a real supermarket? We have one in my neighborhood in MA and you can find passably good produce there. It's certainly not as nice of an experience as the Whole Foods, but you still find organics there.

Calling an area that has an Aldi a "food desert" doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

The Aldi in Englewood isn't really a supermarket - it's more like a dollar-store version of Trader Joe's. They also don't sell much produce (maybe 10 feet of shelf space), and it's usually been sitting on the shelf a while. I think this is more about customer demand than availability. Chicago gets plenty of great produce through its wholesalers (and role as a freight hub) - high quality produce is abundant and cheap at the Latino markets.

dollar-store version of Trader Joe's

The family resemblance is to be expected since the two brands are the result of feuding brothers splitting their family business: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/12/02/aldi_grocery_...

Fair enough! The one over here has a pretty solid frozen vegetable section and reasonably good fresh produce ($0.99 unripe avocados!!!). I'd estimate that they have about 20ft of shelf space for fresh stuff.

This by the way is what Aldi's are like in their home country, Germany. When we stayed with my mother in law it was pretty much the only grocery store around (and in an agricultural area!).

I had the same thought: that part of their goal is to get a cheap location that can attract Hyde Park and Woodlawn folks ("Hi, Mr. President!") who'd otherwise go all the way to the north side or the suburbs. But I very much hope that they can serve the immediate neighborhood well, too. Englewood deserves it.

Edit: Someone else commented that there's also a Whole Foods slated to open right in Hyde Park. So this may not be their strategy in Englewood after all (though the Hyde Park location has evidently had some significant delays, and isn't set to open until 2016 at this point).

Whole Foods doesn't seem to have a lot of trouble setting up shop in more affluent Chicago neighborhoods.

Moreover: people who live in Hyde Park do not as a general rule drive into Englewood for groceries (non-Chicagoans: Hyde Park is an upper class white college town stronghold in the predominantly black south side, and Englewood has a reputation as one of the most dangerous areas in the city).

I'm also having a hard time imagining anyone getting on the Dan Ryan to get groceries, given that there's a giant Whole Foods right at the intersection of the Ryan and the Ike.

If Whole Foods wanted to light up the upper/middle class south side, there are less "interesting" places to park one; Chatham, maybe, for instance. Auburn/Gresham.

Regardless, I'm glad they didn't stick it in Beverly. That map of Whole Foodses in Chicago would have been pretty damning.

Not that it impacts your argument in any way, but classifying Hyde Park as "white" is a little off. It is white in that there is a way higher white population in Hyde Park than in it's surrounding neighborhoods, and that the white population is the biggest racial group, but the white population is not a majority in the neighborhood.

What is accurate to say is that compared to the neighboring areas, Hyde Park is phenomenally affluent and educated and Englewood exists on the exact opposite end of that spectrum.

In any case, it stands, having a Whole Foods in Englewood will not attract Hyde Parkers (especially as they already have 1 high end grocery brand, and are getting a Whole Foods).

You're right. I edited my sentence to include "college town" and split "white" from "stronghold".

Hyde Park is a white stronghold in the sense that it, like Beverly, is a south side neighborhood where white families will happily reside.

"College town" is probably the more appropriate descriptor of Hyde Park.

(I grew up in Beverly, and went to school at Ignatius, so I had a bunch of Hyde Park friends).

My wife and I are very much into knowing where our food came from, how it was raised/produced, etc. As you can imagine, we shop primarily at Whole Foods (outside of our CSA). We are also interested in making sure we buy these products at the best possible prices. So we routinely cross-shop at places like Marianos and even Jewel for these items. Interestingly, the cost of these types of items are almost always cheaper at Whole Foods than anywhere else. I think Marianos and Jewel mark these items up much higher because they take up precious shelf space and tend to move more slowly than the non-organic and/or mass-produced items. Just something to be aware of. If you're concerned about where your food came from, Whole Foods is actually not overpriced. If you look at how European families spend money on groceries proportional to their income, I think the Whole Foods model is more in line with that than the familiar American model. I'd have to Google the numbers, but I believe American families spend roughly 10% of their income on food, whereas Europeans will spend 15-20% of their income.

With all that being said, surely this is a huge risk on Whole Food's part, and I'm not quite sure how it will turn out. I enjoy that there is probably some portion of idealism in this move and I hope it works for both WF and more importantly the residents.

It might not be obvious if you're a vegetarian (or just minimize meat consumption), but Whole Foods is not the most cost-effective way to get high-quality traceable meat. I routinely pay more per-pound for lower-quality protein at Whole Foods than I do at Butcher and Larder, a boutique whole-animal butcher.

Yeah +1 that makes a lot of sense. I eat meat 1-2x a month.

This is a really huge deal. Englewood is a hurting neighborhood and community. These food deserts are real. Children in these areas sometimes grow up eating out of vending machines because there aren't any alternatives. I'm not a romantic, but having had some firsthand experience, these situations are really tragic.

It wouldn't surprise me if this was a package deal with the new Whole Foods opening in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago.

Food deserts are real, and caused by consumer choice. Giving people access to health food does not result in an increase in vegetable consumption or a reduction in BMI.

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/giving-people-ac...

tl;dr; The issue is demand side, not supply side.

So... i know someone. One day his kids were hungry and asked for something to eat. He gave them each a candy bar. He had access to FREE healthy food as he was staying with my parents at the time and he could eat anything there. He could have literally walked two rooms away to the kitchen and found something for them to eat. But i guess he thought a candy bar was just as good as any other food.

Note the last part of his article: "Access may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Policies that are aimed at just eliminating food deserts may not work. More needs to be done."

There are a lot of reasons poor people don't eat healthier; supply is definitely part of it. But not just supply of food, supply of time as well. A poor person is probably working some physically taxing job and is just too tired to cook a healthy meal. Or too tired to get to the market selling healthy food, or... a million other things. It's not just "demand", it's not that they just don't want to eat healthy. Some don't even know fast food is unhealthy. Don't forget, we have people on HN defending fastfood hamburgers..... so imagine the potential confusion about nutrition in a poor & less educated community.

But not just supply of food, supply of time as well. A poor person is probably working...

This is a myth. Poor people mostly don't work at all, and those that do typically work only part time.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2012.pdf

Some don't even know fast food is unhealthy.

Some evidence and context for this is sorely needed. Note: if lack of information were really the cause, then you'd expect plastering healthy eating information all over the NYC subway would fix the problem. Did it?

The best explanation I can come up with is the following. People with low self discipline become poor. People with low self discipline become fat and eat badly. They also don't exercise much and engage in other fun but harmful behaviors (unprotected sex, drug use, drinking to excess). But that's a naughty explanation, even if it fits the data quite well.

Typical victim blaming. Everyone knows poor people have no agency.

What is it that you have against underrepresented people?

Every post about them you're there to say "Nope, it's their own fault.". I only give you the benefit of the doubt because tptacek has you listed in his HN profile. What did you experience/witness in your life that has caused you to hold these views?

  1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541664
  2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076550
  3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1214954
  4. https://www.flickr.com/photos/31110324@N03/5370871466/
  5. http://www.datatau.com/item?id=3338
  6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255165
  7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129845

From your first link, a comment by tptacek starts with

I do not like where 'yummyfajitas logic takes us and would thus like to find ways to disagree with him, but much of what he says checks out.

What if it's just that? What if what he says is simply true?

It is true, almost to the point of truism, that most people who end up with bad outcomes got there by bad choices. But this omits far too much; good choices aren't made merely by moral character or some other characteristic that can let you condemn someone without further consideration. They're a product of a life's education, a learned way of living, and indeed, a learned helplessness in many cases.

I would argue that moral character mostly doesn't exist. It's mostly just an artifact of what you stand to gain vs what you stand to lose if caught, and what your alternatives are. And when these patterns are iterated, the tradeoffs change. Once you have a criminal record, the fear of getting one is far less, and the opportunities to do well for yourself without one disappear. And so on.

I find it disturbing when people dismiss a whole class of other people for decisions that are cast in a moral light, with the language of blame and hints of sins, and connotations of deserving some kind of punishment. It shows a deeply misguided and unempathetic understanding of humans. It's the kind of thinking that dehumanizes other people.

I also think that one needs to look at the underlying assertions and assumptions the federal government puts into its poverty report.

As cited from http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq2.htm

-Its "headcount" approach identifies only the share of people who fall below the poverty threshold, but does not measure the depth of economic need;

-It does not reflect modern expenses and resources, excluding significant draws on income such as taxes, work expenses, and out-of-pocket medical expenses, and excluding resources such as in-kind benefits (e.g., food assistance);

-It does not vary by geographic differences in cost of living within the contiguous United States;

-It is not adjusted for changes in the standard of living over time; and

-Its strict definition of measurement units—"family"—as persons related by blood or marriage does not reflect the nature of many households, including those made up of cohabitors, unmarried partners with children from previous relationships, and foster children.

There is also the fact that government handouts are tremendously regressive. During a time I had of joblessness and no income, I was on food stamps and other supplemental assistance. When I found a part time job (15 hours/wk), I took it! So.. I made $100 in the first full week. I really got $80, less taxes. And cost me $8 for gas, so my real effective pay was $73. So, SNAP takes out $100 from my food benefit.. ?! I only made $73, so I am in effect being punished $37 for working and trying to better myself.

There are cases much more extreme, where every benefit goes down by X when income goes up by X. Those people end worse off working, unless they can get income that covers all of their losses. Any understanding of basic business 101 says that in their case with the regressive benefits system makes no sense to mildly make oneself better. Unfortunately, the bigger 'make oneself better' just never happens.

The comment wasn't about poverty in general but about whether poor people work and how much. The ill-designed incentive structure and generally disappointing performance of government bureaucracy in helping anyone are worth noting, however, if you don't work, you clearly have the time to go do some grocery shopping.

Which was the gist of that comment as it was a response to

A poor person is probably working some physically taxing job and is just too tired to cook a healthy meal. Or too tired to get to the market selling healthy food

Probably not.

I have nothing against "underrepresented people", or any particular feelings toward any class of humans not defined by particular actions.

My views towards poor people are the same as my views towards myself and my friends; most of my own problems are my fault. This is doubly true when statistics suggest a correlation between bad behaviors and negative outcomes.

Note the vast majority of my posts are merely discussion of the world as it is, not an expression of mood affiliation (" I'm so empathetic to favored groups, bask in my moral virtue"). And if you actually want to fix things rather than morally posture, you need to do the same.

Further, note that in at least one of your links, I'm advocating in favor of the poor (India being my goto example) and against the rich (american "poor"), at least if you read my post through thr lens of mood affiliation. But I guess "those people" don't count.

Most people's actions are controlled by their circumstances. Most people don't have much leeway for free will, and those that do don't know enough to apply it correctly. And since they often they don't even know what they don't know, they can't educate themselves out of their ignorance.

There's remarkably little empathy in what you write. It makes me think you're either on the autistic spectrum, or very young with no life experience, younger that I had thought you were based on your profile age.

Toehead2000 stated your theory more succinctly: "Poor people have no agency." Suffice it to say that I don't agree - I believe poor people are just as human as I am.

Scroll up for a simple way to test whether lack of education is a correct theory. What's the result?

As for empathy, I believe it's nothing but a feel-good substitute for moral reasoning. I've discussed that in more depth in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507328

And the way you are attempting to use it, as a substitute for actual facts, is simply anti-intellectualism. So are the ad-hominem fallacies, which have sadly become commonplace here and in modern culture.

"Poor people have no agency." Suffice it to say that I don't agree - I believe poor people are just as human as I am.

Suffice it to say, I think you are radically overestimating how much agency even you have.

As for empathy, I believe it's nothing but a feel-good substitute for moral reasoning.

Empathy is necessary for human communication. Without it, you will forever be grinding your own axe and never change anyone's mind. You need to be able to get inside other people's heads, and see things from their perspective, in order to change their minds and behaviours. And in doing this, you see that most people are not that different to you. Usually, they just have different information.

Principles - and I prefer ethical principles to a system of morality with its baggage-laden language of judgement - are useful tools for judging things. But if you want to actually change the world, and improve things, you need more than that. You need to be able to take action, and predict the results of your action. And here's the paradox: the action that is most principled may not lead to the result that is most good. It may even be harmful to the greater good.

Now, I'm not saying that ends justify means, either, but rather: viewing actions through a simplistic principle-based lens is ultimately not productive.

I don't think there's any god. I don't think anyone is going to pat you on the head for doing the right thing even if it results in despair. All we can do is try and improve the human condition for all of us, collectively, into the future. And in this, ends do matter. Simplistic principles are not enough.

Being honest, you come off as extremely out-of-touch with the experience of poor people in the US. Have you had any close relationships with poor people? I don't mean an educated person that is down on their luck, or college students eating ramen, but someone who grew up poor and is still poor now.

Most people here probably agree with you that poor people tend to have worse impulse control. But you seem totally unaware of how significantly stress, trauma, or desperation affect impulse control. It's more than just stress about paying the bills. I tutored reading at an intercity elementary school and there were kids there who had family members incarcerated or murdered, homes foreclosed, parents making the local headlines for child abuse, etc. One boy I taught had to move out of his house because someone shot it up in a driveby looking for his older brother. A girl from a refugee family had 19 siblings and a physically abusive, alcoholic father. My coworker taught a boy whose parents were both in prison for murder. It was not uncommon to see little kids wearing RIP shirts for friends and family members. These stories are so much more common than you'd think. I'm not being hyperbolic, look at gunshot and homocide maps for Chicago in a single year:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Yt65uE9YlMk/UR7-1mGIo8I/A...

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?oe=UTF8&source=embed&ie...

Sure, a phenomenally resilient person can make it out of horrible circumstances, but the average person isn't able to. I personally don't think I would have fared well if I grew up in a bad environment. As a younger person I was angry and depressed enough already without the reality of hearing gunshots nightly, losing family members, facing systemic discrimination, going to bed hungry, etc. I had a great family and I still fucked up along the way sometimes. I also had a support system that allowed me to take the risks that made me independent and not poor today.

I somewhat disagree with your last point too. I grew up in the US but now live in a very poor country. The struggle is bad in both countries, just different.

When I live in the US I mostly live in poor neighborhoods. I've known many poor people. And I've observed a number of poor people get off their ass, get a job, and stop being poor. Let me point out two issues:

I don't mean an educated person that is down on their luck, or college students eating ramen...

If poverty were actually the cause of assorted bad things, then why wouldn't college students experience those same bad things? Clearly something else is at work.

You provide one possible alternative factor: crime. Perhaps we need more police in certain regions, drone powered surveillance, or other such solutions. That's a problem, but it's a) unrelated to the question of whether time spent working prevents poor people from cooking and b) minimally related to poverty.

Because most college students are not poor in the sense that they grew up poor and still are poor. And college students who grew up poor are much more likely to leave college midway through, which is an obvious effect of dealing with ever-looming stress, health problems, and trauma that people from a poor background are much more likely to deal with.

It's impossible to go to college or enter the workforce and just switch off all the bad things in your past and present. From my experience a lot of my college friends who left midway through had family problems, often financial or health problems. Again this is stuff that poor people go through much more, and it negatively impacts their ability to hold down a job, finish college, and succeed in general.

It's a complicated issue but you seem to have no desire to understand it further than "get off your ass, get a job, and stop being poor".

And I strongly disagree that the US needs more police.

Surveillance is inevitable and if data and access are open, then I'm relatively at ease with it.

Edit: Crime is minimally related to poverty? I don't know how you can justify that statement.

And college students who grew up poor are much more likely to leave college midway through, which is an obvious effect of dealing with ever-looming stress, health problems, and trauma that people from a poor background are much more likely to deal with.

So the claim is not that being poor is directly an issue, but that poor people are more likely to have other issues.

You seem to strongly disagree with me even though I said basically the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8613583

Relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

For the most part, I like having my assumptions challenged, but Chris is more credible the closer his core argument is to the facts he's mustering. In comparing, say, rural Indian poverty to US urban poverty, he can marshal a pretty strong argument. But in diagnosing the roots of US urban policy from BLS statistics, his rhetorical strategy is a lot less effective.

Not every worthwhile commenter is going to make you happy all the time.

You need to spend more time walking in other people's shoes before you leap to judgement.

Your quest to fit the data is admirable; the data available to me suggests that you either have some axe to grind, and are hiding your axe behind the veil of the reasoning process on display, or else you suffer a breathtaking lack of introspection, since every human being alive has experienced a variety of pathological effects, like poor decision making and poor impulse control, as a result of some temporary stressor. You're hungry, you yell at your wife; you get chewed out by your boss, you kick the dog; you get fired and you buy a bottle of vodka and a pepperoni pizza and spread out on the couch.

It takes minimal imagination to extend these common experiences to a world where one is not momentarily hungry, or momentarily stressed, or momentarily taking shit from someone in power, but is rather subject to a constant onsalught of stressors due to poverty or systematic racism, and to imagine the consequences that such circumstances might produce. And yet you're not alone in your failure to do this minimal amount of mental work.

So as an aid to you in explaining the variance in the data, since your own life's experiences have seemingly left you with your current best explanation that a wide swathe of humanity is demonstrably and inherently inferior to the swathe of humanity that is currently winning, this book might serve as a useful meta-analysis covering the relevant issues:

http://us.macmillan.com/scarcity/

References inside.

I was responding to this: But not just supply of food, supply of time as well. A poor person is probably working...

Many people have done all sorts of stupid things, me included. For example, a few months back I was moping about a woman in London and not getting any work done, nor was I exercising.

Suppose someone comes along and asks why I'm not getting any exercise. The following is an incorrect reason: "...supply of time...probably working hard..."

The correct reason: I was sleeping until 2PM and hitting up the old monk before 6pm. I was banging a Rwandan pimpstress, a Ukrainian who got turned on by eve teasing and assorted other odd characters. Ganja played a role in this story as well.

None of this is work. It would be wrong to say I didn't exercise because I was working hard. Someone who says "chris wasn't working hard" does not have an axe to grind. They are simply correctly pointing out that enjoying ganja and unhappily married women [1] is not work.

[1] Tip: In India any woman over 26 should be presumed married. Learn from my mistakes.

Reading the rest of your comments makes it evident that you have an axe to grind.

Food deserts are caused by decades-long social and economic pressures that may manifest as "consumer choice," as espoused in the following comments. It is really not surprising whatsoever that opening a grocery store in a food desert did not reduce BMI in the community in 6 months.

From my perspective, you are using the veil of rationality to advance an intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt argument. When I encounter a line of argument like yours, I find that it is nearly certain the other individual has little personal experience with underserved communities or individuals. I challenge you to any first-hand work in truly underserved American communities. The vast majority of these people are not simply lazy or lacking in impulse control, but are stuck in a socioeconomic feedback loop.

Never thought I would stick up for Whole Foods, but their price on the basics(milk, butter, some bread, flour) is cheaper/same price than Safeway. Their bulk food section is overpriced. I'm not sure why they overprice the bulk foods; I think they figure we can't do the math? Examlpe: Lumberg rice is cheaper than WF bulk rice? If anyone from Whole Foods reads this, and I imagine everyone of these posts are going to be dissected my management--get rid of the Security Guards. If you are that conserved about theft, use undercover guards.

The Whole Foods in Almaden (affluent South San Jose) hires off-duty San Jose PD to provide security. The officers are in full uniform and carry their utility belt and service weapon.

> Get rid of the security guards.

I assure you, they will not.

http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/community

I could see putting in a Trader Joe's, but Whole Foods? Whole Foods is overpriced silliness. "Organic salt", stuff like that.

Each area is different I guess. In NYC Whole Foods is among the cheapest of the supermarkets and one of the highest in quality. For example, Gristedes and Morton Williams cost more and their fruits/veges selection is poor.

I think you mean Manhattan, the other boroughs have a few more options like Waldbaums and Key Food, etc.

Manhattan sucks for decent affordable groceries because there's a substantial culture of frequently eating out and those that eat in normally do so because they want the gourmet experience at home, so they're looking for high-end stuff. That and everything costs more in Manhattan.

Go across the river to NJ and right away you'll see Wholefoods is obscenely expensive when compared to Trader Joe's, H Mart, Pathmark, Shop Rite, and local farmers markets.

Does Trader Joes cost less than Whole Foods in Manhattan?

Yes it does.

Yes, but there are only 3 Trader Joe's in all of Manhattan. Two of them are down near NYU and the other is on the Upper West side, which makes them difficult to access for people living in midtown, uptown and virtually the entire east side.

On the upper east side, where I live, the options are pretty much Gristedes, Morton Williams, Food Emporium and Fairway. Gristedes and Morton Williams are overpriced with a bad selection of produce. Food Emporium is worse. Fairway's prices are more reasonable and the produce selection is actually quite good, but I tend to think the quality of Whole Foods' produce is a bit better.

This is when you trek up to Cosco in East Harlem. Getting one of the hire cars back is only around $10.

Except I've found the produce in the small corner grocery stores (like Associated's) to be much lower cost and the same or higher quality (due to the turnover).

Manhattan sucks for decent affordable groceries because semitrailers, are not permitted in most of the city. Everything has to be transferred to smaller trucks, which usually means a pass through, and possibly resale at, the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center in the Bronx, or through some facility in New Jersey. In many parts of Manhattan, trucks aren't allowed at all during the daytime. So there's lots of extra handling required.

(Ref: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/tm1trafpolicies.pd...)

Older cities with narrow streets have it even worse, with little warehouses where the medium-sized trucks transfer to tiny trucks.

The boxed mac & cheese at the Whole Foods near me is cheaper than that at the local corner store. You can spend stupid amounts of money at Whole Foods, but they've got a reasonable selection that is reasonably priced when you look past the overpriced stuff.

Whole Foods has a huge selection of niche products. Trader Joe's specifically carries a very limited number of items and much of stock is their brand.

I am one of those vegan health and fitness obsessed girls and even I find Whole Foods a bit pricy, but they're doing well so they seem to have an appeal to a lot of folks.

Tim Harford tried to myth-bust this a few years ago. Yes, you can buy Maldon sea salt at Whole Foods, but you can also buy (more prominently displayed) Morton kosher, and it's priced the same was it is at Safeway. There are organic lemons that cost $1/unit more than conventional lemons, but there are also conventional lemons.

The way you tend to spend more money at Whole Foods than you would at Safeway is, you go for staples and end up buying premium stuff. So: don't do that.

The "Whole Paycheck" trap is mostly a problem for people who aren't price sensitive when picking out groceries.

And let's not forget that the prices at those corner stores aren't low either!

"an 18,000-square-foot Whole Foods."

18,000 is actually small for a supermarket and in fact the average Whole Foods is 38,000 square feet:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/whole_...

They only mention SNAP in passing, but I guarantee it features large on the spreadsheets back at HQ. Everyone I've known who was on it seemed a little nostalgic about buying expensive food they wouldn't normally. (However, my sample size is two).

This was my first instinct, Whole Foods wants to see if the SNAP money can subsidize a location in a low income area.

Which is not inherently a bad thing.

The average monthly SNAP benefit per person in Illinois is $138/month, or $4.60 a day. You're not going to be living large on it.

[http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/pd/18SNAPavg$PP....]

If you spend 4.60 per day on unprocessed food and a little meat you can get high quality food. But you need to cook it. Or you can basically starve on chips and soda. Now if your unemployed / underemployed and have free time foor cooking it's not unreasonable to shop at whole foods. Assuming you don't need to watch kids / elderly / or the disabled.

Though transportation is often a major issue keeping people shopping at the corner store.

There are 2,040,053 SNAP recipients in IL, at an average of $138 per month, total benefits equal $281,527,314. Per month. Even if only a quarter live in Chicago, that's still nearly $1 billion a year in SNAP benefits in Chicago alone.

And that's still $138/month/person, leaving the point that no one's living large on this sort of budget entirely intact.

That is so far from the point being made that I have to wonder if you are being honest with yourself in writing this comment.

I understood the point, I have been on SNAP before and I am aware that $138 isn't a whole lot of money for food. I was merely stating that there are at least $1 billion dollars of SNAP money per year in Chicago and Whole Foods is trying to get some of that money by being present. It is not the only reason, just one of many. Also, SNAP recipients pay for food with cash too, it's not like being on SNAP means you cannot spend other income on food.

A point that one might be able to gather from this is that Whole Foods could be trying to capture some of that by being present where it is used.

The average SNAP recipient has other income to spend on food. The benefit is a supplement. Except at the maximum end, it's not intended to fully fund your food purchases. Those "live off the average SNAP benefit" publicity stunts are disingenuous.

I've talked to some Whole Foods employees about this. Cashiers at the location I frequent have estimated that anywhere from 10% to 30% of their sales are made to people using SNAP. It's hard for me to make sense of it given how much a grocery bill at WF is and how little assistance SNAP offers, but those were the 'numbers'.

I had been know to call it "Whole Paycheck" in the past, but I've found prices not to be too bad if you're selective, such as their house-brand products.

Exactly. You CAN spend a lot of money at Whole Foods--and I'm often tempted to-- but you don't really have to. Interestingly in Fresh Pond in Cambridge, there's a Whole Foods that's the only supermarket near a housing project though it's also convenient for people on their way out to the suburbs.

Still, $4.60 a day? Even when shopping steep sales and eating vegan, I'm not sure they could make that work. Oranges and apples are sometimes (like right now) less than a dollar a pound, but generally they cost between a dollar and two dollars a pound. Nuts and seeds are up over $10 a pound. And if they want to buy processed foods like pasta, the quality will be no different than they could get elsewhere for much less money.

I think the amount of Link card (the payment mechanism for SNAP in IL) use we see at WF is actually the byproduct of fraud or wastefulness. I remember in the 90's, in an inner-city property complex that one of my friend's parents owned, that food stamps (which were much more like food cash than pre-loaded cards) were traded amongst residents and other community members for either drugs or cash. I assume that, at the top of the line in those transactions, some well-off group of people ended up with several times the monthly allotment for SNAP and would just spend it like a typical price-insensitive rich person.

I'm not sure that's even possible now, but what I've found with government programs is that no matter the lengths they go to to insulate themselves from fraud, that in the face of creative people who are incentivised to cheat the system, it never seems to be enough to actually protect themselves.

SNAP won't let you shop at WF for long.

A few years ago, I indulged in an experiment: I'd try to live off the SNAP amount for a month. I assumed a budget of $110, and tried to make 3 meals/day out of it. I had to resort to all sorts of trickery to make it work, but I did; by shopping at Mexican grocery stores and swinging by farmers' markets at closing time (when they have to get rid of their produce, and hence offer massive discounts) I was able to survive. It wasn't easy, and I for sure wasn't eating organic foods!

Whole Foods also opened the first full supermarket in downtown Detroit. Imagine a city of 700,000 people without a single supermarket.

Course they received millions in subsidies to do it. But the program was out there for awhile and no other supermarket chain would take the chance.

Whole Foods success was followed by other chains. However the other chains took the subsidies and built their supermarkets out on 8 mile which is the dividing line between Detroit and the suburbs. While the stores are technically within Detroit the suburbs are right across the street so their risk was much lower.

There are actually quite a few other supermarkets in the area (like E and L). It's the chains that are / were largely scared (outside of like Spartan)

>> Whole Foods also opened the first full supermarket in downtown Detroit. Imagine a city of 700,000 people without a single supermarket.

Don't spread this lie. I know food deserts are a popular myth but there are plenty of grocery stores in the city of Detroit. Sure, they might not have a Kroger or Meijer but there are plenty of smaller grocery stores like Save A Lot and ethnic markets.

People don't really think everyone in Detroit lives on a diet of snack foods, $1 menu burgers, and fruit flavored soft drinks, do they?

> People don't really think everyone in Detroit lives on a diet of snack foods, $1 menu burgers, and fruit flavored soft drinks, do they?

Some people apparently think all Americans live that way. Never underestimate the power of preconceptions and stereotypes, especially when they're Not Racist.

"Supermarket" refers to a grocery store that is significantly larger than traditional neighborhood grocery stores.

I shop organic, typically at farmer's markets, and actively cook. I lived in Toledo for a little while and visited Detroit. While you have access to supermarkets in that part of the country the access is very poor. I ate a lot of fast food simply because fast food is within 5 min and a super market is often times 30 min. Produce is typically poor quality and imported.

https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@41.6476485,-...

It doesn't look that bad. Did you somehow miss Kroger and Meijer are supermarkets?

Most of the coders living downtown I know before Whole Foods all drove to the suburbs to shop. Those small stores offered little variety along with limited selections of fruits and vegetables.

Nobody said Detroit was a food desert or that it had no grocery stores. The claim was that it had no supermarket. You said "don't spread this lie" but then gave no evidence it was a lie. Is it a lie (I wouldn't know)?

With the shift in other supermarkets carrying more organic and "luxury" items like Jewel and Mariano's purchasing Dominick's locations and building stores that carry a wide range of organic to normal shelf items, Whole Foods isn't the high end gem it once was. You can now get the things you got there at regular stores (that have more acceptable pricing). My guess is this is putting pressure on Whole Foods' growth strategy.

"My guess is this is putting pressure on Whole Foods' growth strategy."

Agree.

And it will be interesting to see the exact product mix of that store is vs. the one that is located where I am.

My guess (in addition to what the article says) it will be quite different.

At a local WF "clone" that I also frequent (just opened) last night I bought some raw pistachios. I didn't even look at the price. When I got to the register they were $13.50 for 8 ozs. (I'm sure WF has a similar product.) My point is that's easily an 1 hour's after tax wage or more in that area. (Maybe 2 hours..) Hard to believe the product mix is going to include items like that.

Anyway growth wise WF could come up with a new brand (which is typically what would happen) but here they decide to use the same premium brand name because, and this is important and in addition to any PR benefit, the people who would shop at an upscale whole foods won't know what goes on at this Whole Foods (if it in fact would even matter to them). It could look like a warehouse and they'd never know that. Not the same as with a consumer product that makes it into the channel and could destroy your brand name.

Putting a Whole Foods in Englewood is fraught for the same reason it would be in Humboldt Park (well, minus the gentrification issue).

Go to Jimenez or Del Rancho and check out the produce section: it's comparable in size to a Whole Foods, but stocked very differently. You can find a small tub of lemongrass or buddhas hand citrus at Whole Foods, along with a small tub of jalapenos and maybe a plaintain. You can't find buddhas hand at Jimenez at all, but fresh peppers are stacked floor to ceiling.

Produce variety at Jimenez is poorer than Whole Foods. But quantity is much greater, and quality is higher. Jimenez does a better job at stocking the ingredients people in their neighborhood actually use.

Similarly: you can get cheap-cheap-cheap top round or ground pork or skirt or chorizo at Del Rancho. You can't get hanger steak, air-chilled cage-free chicken, or 15 varieties of chicken-apple sausage.

Having a serious grocery store in Englewood is an unalloyed good thing, no matter whether they choose to stock Organic Valley Sour Cream or Salvadoran crema (the crema is better, by the way). But if Whole Foods really wants to help the south side, they're going to have run a different kind of Whole Foods. It would be really neat to see them try.

"Nor is it a bet, by Whole Foods, on neighborhood change."

Although, if the neighborhood did happen to gentrify, as has been the goal of the Emanuel administration for Chicago as a whole, that would be a happy coincidence.

Normally, gentrification is a slow creep that happens on a block-by-block basis. This does not apply to Englewood. The Whole Foods is being built essentially in the heart of urban poverty in Chicago.

Nobody is moving to Englewood because a Whole Foods opened up.

This is super exciting. I was disappointed by one pull quote: "This is not an experiment. African American people are not an experiment,” Thompson says. “People need to stop thinking like that, that we cannot afford the things that people in other communities have.”

The fact is: this is a poor community, and the accepted wisdom is that they can't have nice things. This is indeed an experiment to show that that accepted wisdom is wrong. There's nothing wrong with doing experiments: we do them all the time, whether it's testing drugs or the work of economists like Esther Duflo, these are crucial. And I sure hope if throws sand back in the face of those who have given up on these communities.

I hope that (assuming the demographics really do skew poor and food stamps) that the cashiers aren't mandated to harass the cusomters with WFs bullshit charities. I used to work at the Palo Alto WF for 4 years, and a couple of times a year there were periods where it was mandatory for cashiers to ask customers about WFs latest bullshit charity schemes-like the Whole Planet Foundation, etc. It was bad enough doing that in rich PAMPA, but hopefully the store management has a bit more flexibility opening up in freaking Detroit (assuming its not a store heavily visited by 28 year old start up employees with obscene amounts of money).

I do not know about Chicago or Englewood, so I do not have much to comment on this particular stuff, but riding on the theme - I work across a Whole Foods and across the street are many low-income apartments, I did not find many people from those apartments shopping or working at whole foods. If their desire is to address food deserts this store has to be completely different from their standard configuration and unless that is not the case, this is either well-intentioned yet misguided effort or calculated low cost land acquisition.

On the topic of Whole Foods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609515

"The neighborhood was targeted by the city as a "food desert," although corner stores are common and discount-grocer Aldi's is just down the street."

My corner shops and my local Aldi must be unusual. No problem sourcing fresh produce at reasonable prices (UK).

I wonder if anyone is looking out for the corner shop people.

Isn't that what the 'although' in the sentence means? That the neighborhood was designated as a food desert, despite having stores that sell fresh produce?

OK, so 'food desert' means something different to what I thought it meant.

Can we get a "saved you a click" summary?

Ten million dollar subsidy by the city of Chicago, high SNAP redemption flow in Detroit store in similar situation.

Favorite quote: “No one steals vegetables.”

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