Socialist grocery stores won’t stop Chicago crime
Washington Examiner
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Crime is up, Chicago is facing a half-billion-dollar budget deficit, and tens of thousands of residents are fleeing the city every year. Mayor Brandon Johnson has a solution: city-owned grocery stores.
“We know access to grocery stores is already a challenge for many residents, especially on the South and West sides,” he said at a press conference announcing the project. “I am proud to work alongside partners to take this step in envisioning what a municipally owned store in Chicago could look like.”
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The “partner” in this case is a far-left think tank called the Economic Security Project, which has never run grocery stores but excels at spending founder Chris Hughes’s money, mostly on pilot projects intended to promote a government-funded universal basic income. The Chicago grocery store plan is just one element of the Economic Security Project’s much larger effort to create socialized banks, drugmakers, and child care providers.
None of these enterprises have gotten off the ground yet, but there is a growing number of small cities that tried the same grocery experiment without the Economic Security Project’s help. Baldwin, Florida, population 1,600, has one. Erie, Kansas, population 1,047, has another.
A government store in a small town where everyone knows everyone else is one thing. You can’t walk into the only grocery in a town of a thousand people, empty the shelves, and leave without paying. Your fellow citizens, the store owners, will track you down.
But in a metropolis of millions, where theft is not only a problem generally, but is the reason Walmart was forced to close four stores in Chicago earlier this year, a government store would be a financial sinkhole.
Johnson claims Chicago taxpayers will not pay for any store expenses. Apparently state and federal grants are being lined up to fund the opening. “It’s not necessarily about profitability,” Johnson’s policy chief Umi Grigsby told reporters. “It really is about what is the impact on Chicagoans.”
But if the store is going to be successful once grant money runs out, it must turn a profit or at least break even. Otherwise it’s not really a city-run store but a glorified food bank where low-income Chicago residents can come to get free food. The Greater Chicago Food Depository already provides more than 70 million pounds of food a year through 700 pantries. How would Johnson’s grocery store be different?
What the residents of Chicago’s South and West sides need is a safe community where store owners need not worry about profit margins walking out of the door under the arms of thieves. Johnson has no plan to make that happen.
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Instead of hiring more police and prosecuting criminals they arrest to make the streets safe, Johnson makes excuses for looters and sues car makers for making their cars too easy to steal.
Maybe when Chicago’s city-run grocery store goes bust, as it will, Johnson can sue himself for making the store too easy to shoplift from.