The Real Reason for Food Deserts

Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, had a thread on BlueSky Sunday that filled in a piece of the puzzle in America's changed retail landscape. From the reposts I saw, I suspect I'm not the only one who didn't know about what she described.

She wrote it up in The Atlantic (here's the link, but I imagine it is paywalled) in an article called "The Mystery of Food Deserts," but she also gave the facts in her thread.

This is some of what she shared, but you can get the rest with the BlueSky link above or by reading the Atlantic piece:

The conventional explanation for food deserts—that these places are too poor or too rural to generate enough spending on groceries, or too Black to overcome racist corporate redlining — fail to grapple with a key fact: food deserts didn’t used to exist. Poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, but food deserts arrived only in the late 1980s. Prior to that, even the smallest towns and poorest neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store — and often they had several.

So things changed in the late 1980s and really got going in the 1990s. (Another negative to lay at the feet of Ronald Reagan.) Why?

Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s — the Federal Trade Commission stopped enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, a key antitrust law designed to ensure robust competition in retailing.

Congress passed Robinson-Patman in 1936. At the time, the large grocery chain A&P was rapidly taking over the market—not by outcompeting on service and efficiency, but by using its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it much lower prices than they charged local grocers.

The Robinson-Patman Act outlaws price discrimination. It does allow for legit volume discounts. If it costs less to sell a product by the truckload vs. the case, then suppliers can adjust their prices—so long as every retailer buying a truckload gets the same discount.

For nearly 50 years, the law was enforced. It produced a remarkably competitive grocery industry, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and the market split roughly in half between chains and independents....

Then the law was abandoned in the 1980s, amid a rollback of antitrust. But while enforcement of other laws was merely weakened, Robinson-Patman was shelved entirely. Its focus on fairness for small businesses was anathema to the dominant thinking about scale and progress.

Overnight, the move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers.

Walmart was (of course!) the first company to take advantage of this, using its buying power to squeeze its suppliers. It grew rapidly, littering the country with big-box stores, while causing existing smaller stores to close.

Mitchell ends by calling for renewed enforcement of Robinson-Patman, which is still on the books. Of course, that seems very unlikely under the Trump Administration. But it's something to keep in mind if we can ever get back to a government that enforces the antitrust laws of this country, as Lina Khan's FTC was doing in the past few years.