Booze takes a back seat at some Tenderloin corner stores
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Booze-takes-a-back-seat-at-some-Tenderloin-corner-6290560.php
Satwinder Bill Multani still sells Olde English 800 at the Daldas Grocery store he owns in the heart of the Tenderloin. The Steel Reserve cans still have their spot in the cooler. So do the Colt .45 bottles and the menacing Stack High Gravity Smooth Lager, with its 9.9 percent alcohol content and $2 price.
But thats not what Susanta Dhakal was lined up for last Thursday on the corner of Eddy and Taylor. Instead, Dhakal, a taxi driver from Nepal who lives in a residential hotel down the block, was picking up cilantro and ginger, two cucumbers and a tomato....
Two weeks ago, Dhakal would not have been able to get his curry ingredients at Daldas. He would have walked three or four blocks, or more likely, headed over to Stockton Street in Chinatown. But now theres a corner store with bananas and shallots and collard greens a one-minute walk from his pad.
Daldas is the latest corner store to be reset under the citys healthy corner store program, an initiative to persuade the Tenderloins bodegas to ramp up the sale of fresh produce and healthy groceries while scaling back or least de-emphasizing heavily processed junk food, cigarettes and booze.
So people in the Tenderloin have better access to produce than I do in my middle-class neighborhood in "Sad Jose". Will wonders never cease?
The only supermarket near me is across I-280, accessible only by a rather sketchy footbridge. And it's generally thronged with families, leading to long waits at the register.