Cities and counties will have to up their game concerning retail and food deserts

-- "Are poor neighborhoods retail deserts?," USC Lusk Center for Real Estate
-- Baltimore City Food Desert Retail Strategy

1.  CNN has a story about dollar stores ("Dollar stores are everywhere. That's a problem for poor Americans") and how some advocates argue that a preponderance of dollar stores in a community makes it more difficult to recruit a traditional grocery store.

2.  For a planning project I'm trying to work on, I reviewed a piece I wrote many years ago, "In lower income neighborhoods, are businesses supposed to be "community organizations" first?," about how to develop reasonable options for under-served, under-stored, or impoverished communities.

It discusses hard discount options like Sav-A-Lot and PriceRite, creating co-operatives, the public market as a model, and the resources offered by the nonprofit consulting firm UpLift Solutions, which is affiliated with a supermarket firm operating in Philadelphia.

There are some other initiatives, like in Baltimore, DMG Foods created by the Salvation Army ("Salvation Army Opens First Grocery Store Ever In Baltimore," NPR), or a small market called Market@25th in Richmond that has opened in the Church Hill neighborhood ("Market at 25th opens in Richmond food desert elating neighbors," WTVR-TV; "Being There: The Market@25th," Richmond Style Weekly).

 Market@25th is a for profit, created by a somewhat benevolent person. The nonprofit Fare & Easy which opened up a few years ago is no longer in operation as a nonprofit, but it was sold to a for profit entity that still operates it.

3.  The State of Pennsylvania, in conjunction with the Food Trust, also has a grant program to assist in the development of supermarkets in understored areas.

I think more communities are going to have to create similar programs.

-- Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative

4.  Food Trust publishes the Healthy Food Financing Handbook.

5. Communities are going to have to be more proactive and in more retail categories than food, if they want to bring about more retail activation in their communities.

6. I haven't written about Shoppers Food Warehouse, which operates in Maryland and Virginia.

It had been run poorly for years, by the major wholesaler Supervalu. But then Supervalu got bought and the new operator has mishandled the supermarket chains even worse than Supervalu, announcing they would be selling them off and closing stores and selling off the pharmacy operations in the meantime, thereby making the stores harder to sell/keep in operation.

The Post wrote about it last Sunday ("Shoppers Food was sold: what will happen to its storesin Maryland and Virginia?").

It's an especial problem for Prince George's County, because they had 12 SFW stores (one just closed), and more recently Giant and Safeway have closed stores in the County as well. (Giant did buy and convert some SFW stores in Virginia.)

According to the trade magazine Food World, the reason the sell off has been so difficult is that besides mishandling the task, the operator, Unfi, wants new purchasers to take on the pension fund obligations of SFW off their hands and firms are balking. They'd rather wait it out, let the stores close, and then take over the locations they want.

Anyway, there aren't many options. I don't know if Prince George's County has reached out to likely operators, but if not, they ought to, and they should be contacting UpLift Solutions too.

To me, their best options are: (1) Wakefern/Shoprite, although the firm doesn't operate many full line stores in the area, the do have a store in Montgomery County, and some around Baltimore. The cooperative is much bigger in PA-NJ-DE, etc. They do operate a couple of their PriceRite discount food stores in Prince George's County now.  Wakefern is one of the more successful independent supermarket groups in the US, so they'd be a good partner.

(2) Maybe the independent B. Green out of Baltimore, which used to be a wholesaler but sold off that operation awhile ago ("B. Green & Co. has evolved from wholesale grocer to retailer over 100 years," Baltimore Sun). They have a discount operation called Food Depot and a higher end store called Green Valley Marketplace, which operates in Anne Arundel and Baltimore Counties.

(3) Ethnic independents like MegaMart and L.A. Mart, which already operate in or around PG County.

(4) And by reaching out to C&S Wholesalers, which supplies many of the independents in the region.  Or the independent store group IGA, which works with a different wholesaler.

(5) Maybe the growing Streets Market & Cafe, which is based in DC, but at this time only operates in higher income areas.

(6) Weis Markets.  They are based in Pennsylvania, but have been expanding into Maryland and Virginia, buying stores sold off by others.  The closest Weis Markets store I've seen is just north of Rockville, but I do think they've had problems digesting the acquisitions, although Food World reports the firm is doing better now.

(7) Lidl.  Lidl bought a small company with 25 stores mostly on Long Island, and is in the process of converting them.  They could take on a bunch of locations in PG County similarly and have a prominent position in the marketplace much sooner than a store by store development program.

Although the company's launch in the US hasn't gone so well, but they have already committed to at least two stores in PGC.