Would such a store sell food at less than the market price, potentially putting private stores out of business? Would it sell only expensive organic produce for health reasons? What about liability? And not enough people said that if you want a grocery store in your neighborhood, you have to support it with your business.Īldi appears to be the only one to have found the right niche, but that store with some branches in less affluent neighborhoods might now find itself competing with the city itself. Save-A-Lot, some said, was too downscale. They were not much interested in the niceties from 2016, and, as a result, they were not exactly welcomed to Englewood with open arms, with residents reportedly concerned about quality and freshness. Up next in that fraught space came Yellow Banana, a Black-owned company with a supermarket chain named Save-A-Lot.

That wasn’t the end of the Englewood grocery debacle. Amazon was smart enough to try to mask the closure by also nixing a Lincoln Park Whole Foods at DePaul University that was being used only for pandemic-era delivery, but the bottom line was the bottom line. Had Whole Foods been making money, it would have remained. They are only about the ongoing profitability of the store. And when the new owners come in, they don’t look at what money has been given to fund the startup costs because those costs already are sunk, nor do they usually care about the ethical habits of the previous management. In the case of Whole Foods, that took the form of Amazon in 2017. What the city should have learned from that disaster was that traditional businesses are in danger of being taken over.

In actuality, the Tribune reported that Whole Foods had reduced its prices on milk, bread, eggs and some produce and sold them at far lower prices than elsewhere in the city. Whole Foods said very little as to why, trying to duck the public relations hit, but grocery trade publications analyzing the debacle homed in on the store’s relatively small size - it was some 18,000 square feet, whereas many Whole Foods stores are about 50,000 square feet or more - and the perception of local residents that it was too small to do a full shop, as well as being expensive and not truly from the community.

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