The Land Use and Health Project, a project of the Public Health Law Program at the Public Health Institute released an article in their Spring 2007 Healthy Planning Newsletter about an announcement made by the British mega-chain supermarket Tesco that the company plans to open 100-150 stores, up to 3,000 square feet each, in the United States over the next two years.

According to the Healthy Planning Newsletter, Tesco plans for these stores to be about the size of most urban corner stores or bodegas, which largely sell unhealthy items like liquor, tobacco, and packaged junk food, and provide little in the way of affordable fresh produce, milk, and other healthy items. Tesco proposes to focus its offer on fresh produce, wines, and in-store bakeries.

As the Healthy Planning Newsletter points out, one benefit to Tesco’s small stores launch is that the smaller stores could potentially be easier to site in dense urban neighborhoods that tend to lack adequate real estate to accommodate larger conventional supermarkets.

One downside to Tesco’s plan discussed in the Healthy Planning Newsletter is that a large grocery chain like Tesco would be competing with local businesses and could be taking away dollars that would otherwise recirculate in the local economy if spent at locally-owned businesses.

Another downside that I see to Tesco’s plan is a potential eclipsing of opportunities for local entrepreneurs to serve the needs of their urban communities by developing their own grocery retail business models. While the small store format is a viable model and solution for closing the “grocery store gap” in inner city communities, it’s also important that those communities benefit economically from such enterprises.

The Healthy Planning Newsletter contends that chain retail stores have mixed track records of creating living-wage jobs that provide benefits to employees. Beyond low-wages and limited or benefits, such large scale chains do not enable local communities to actually have a stake in the business or a chance to develop local entrepreneurs.

While there is an urgent need to address the disparities and barriers in the food retail industry, it’s also important that solutions that can empower and benefit communities and local economies in multiple ways be supported and given the opportunity to flourish.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 7:19 pm and is filed under People's Grocery, Food Systems, Oakland, Organic Food, Food Justice, Grocery Stores, Nutrition, West Oakland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.