This store is terrific. It has a nice selection of very fresh fruits, vegetables and meats. It has a terrific array of lower cost healthy grocery choices. I look around me and see this very diverse shopping population filling their carriages with mostly healthy foods.
Here's my hypotheses. When folks from "food deserts" go shopping away from home and buy food for a week or so, they get a lot of healthy foods, with the best of intentions. But when the store is just a short walk away, and they're buying food for immediate consumption, they choose junk.
Does my hypothesis make any sense?
Food deserts can be summed up in two words.
Shoplifting and SNAP.
Whenever the shrink numbers from shoplifting get too high, a low-margin grocery business can’t survive, and the store closes. Likewise when the vast majority of customers are using benefit programs like SNAP and AFDC the added administrative burdens eat-up the grocer’s margins, and the store closes.
You can’t drop below a certain percentage of full-retail cash customers and survive in the grocery business.
Planning does usually give better results then impulse.
A trip to the mega-low mart for me requires planning so I go with a list, (now generated from the store's web site with some coupons attached) other coupons I pick up here and there and a meal plan in mind.
There is also the fact that people who go to a large store generally cook which results in their making better selections.
This would be an extrapolation of "poor people have poor ways".
Another thing I got was that maybe ghetto folks make better decisions when surrounded by higher-socioeconomic folks. The reason I say that is because I have seen an odd dynamic in my city: when a nice supermarket opens up in the wealthier part of town, black folks will drive out of their way to go there even though an equivalent is closer, as if they just want the ambiance or prefer to not get stabbed in the parking lot.
Thoughts?