Ghost Stores: How Grocery Chains Create Food Deserts

With mergers, consolidations, and the crushing of independence, the big four, Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons are raising prices to astronomical levels.

Community organizers in California are faced with an even more insidious industry practice that seems on the surface both anti-consumer and anti-business, the grocery covenant.

This is Beth Smoker.

She's the policy director of the California Food and Farming Network.

So I spoke at a legislative hearing giving testimony about AB 1857, which is a bill we're a proud co-sponsor of called the Grocery Store Access Act.

It is a bill that will prohibit grocery store restrictive covenants.

which are clauses that restrict grocery stores from moving in.

They can be there even after a grocery store has left.

So I like to think of them as a ghost or the SF gate recently called them zombies where a grocery store has left, but they leave behind this restriction that allows no other grocery store to move in for a set number of years.

So, when you see a boarded up grocery store, usually in a rundown shopping center or a gym that's moved into an old supermarket, it may be the result of a restrictive covenant

There's actually really important legal history.

The scholar Professor Christopher Leslie out of UC Irvine, he's traced back racial covenants during like white flight.

So black families were blocked from moving to the suburbs and then supermarkets followed white families out and pulled their stores from the neighborhoods left behind.

And then when those stores left, they often left behind these restrictive covenants, just further concreting these spaces without any grocery access.

With mergers, consolidations, and the crushing of independence, the big four, Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons are raising prices to astronomical levels.

Community organizers in California are faced with an even more insidious industry practice that seems on the surface both anti-consumer and anti-business, the grocery covenant.

This is Beth Smoker.

She's the policy director of the California Food and Farming Network.

So I spoke at a legislative hearing giving testimony about AB 1857, which is a bill we're a proud co-sponsor of called the Grocery Store Access Act.

It is a bill that will prohibit grocery store restrictive covenants.

which are clauses that restrict grocery stores from moving in.

They can be there even after a grocery store has left.

So I like to think of them as a ghost or the SF gate recently called them zombies where a grocery store has left, but they leave behind this restriction that allows no other grocery store to move in for a set number of years.

So, when you see a boarded up grocery store, usually in a rundown shopping center or a gym that's moved into an old supermarket, it may be the result of a restrictive covenant

There's actually really important legal history.

The scholar Professor Christopher Leslie out of UC Irvine, he's traced back racial covenants during like white flight.

So black families were blocked from moving to the suburbs and then supermarkets followed white families out and pulled their stores from the neighborhoods left behind.

And then when those stores left, they often left behind these restrictive covenants, just further concreting these spaces without any grocery access.