Rural areas continue to lose grocery stores, gain dollar stores

[dumbcat]

19. Bingo!

And in all the moaning about full service grocery stores with fresh produce and meats and larger quantities of staples leaving both rural areas and inner cities, there is very little mention of WHY. Maybe there just wasn't enough demand in those smaller places to be able to keep a business going on those items with their very small profit margins. The people in those areas liked their conviemient junk food.

Also, in a fair sized town (about 150K pop.) not too far from me there was a full service regional grocery store in the older "downtown" area of the city. As the area got more and more run down, with homeless living on the street and filthy conditions, businesses started to move out. The grocery store complained to the police and city council about all the homeless shoplifting and breaking into the store at night with nothing ever done about it. The grocery store was losing money. They closed the store and opened up a new supercenter grocery on the other side of town in the newly developing area. Much nicer place, but several miles away from the older, mostly minority "inner city". You should have heard the screams of RACIST! FOOD DESERT! UNFAIR. How could they do this????? Well, maybe if the store was making some money it would have stayed. But ........

Same thing in rural areas. If people won't pay the price to make a store at least break even, they'll go away. They have NO incentive to operate at a loss.