{"id":12128,"date":"2018-04-03T10:51:08","date_gmt":"2018-04-03T14:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=12128"},"modified":"2018-04-04T18:05:55","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T22:05:55","slug":"grocery-chains-and-the-origins-of-the-philadelphias-food-deserts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2018\/04\/grocery-chains-and-the-origins-of-the-philadelphias-food-deserts\/","title":{"rendered":"Grocery Chains and the Origins of Philadelphia’s Food Deserts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
4119 Bairds Court – 4123 Frankford ave. Atlantic and Pacific Grocery Store March 16, 1930. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the 1920s, the average working-class family spent about one-third of its budget on groceries. \u201cMost households spent more to put dinner on the table than for their rent or their mortgage.”<\/p>\n

And where \u201cfood was hugely expensive, relative to wages\u201d neighborhood grocery stores delivered \u201conly moderate amounts of nutrition\u201d according to Marc Levinson. \u201cOnly token stocks of fresh fruits and vegetables\u201d were offered. \u201cFresh fish and poultry were rarities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe poorest third of American households consumed a sorely inadequate daily intake of vitamins and minerals, because there was little of either in the food that their neighborhood shops had for sale.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet grocery stores were everywhere\u2014on nearly every corner.<\/p>\n

Last time<\/a> we learned that by 1911, Philadelphia had more than 5,700 grocery stores, or one for every fifty-four families. By 1929, a national survey documented exactly how widespread the corner grocery actually was. There were 585,980 of them across the United States, \u201cone for every fifty-one American families.”<\/p>\n

Behind their wooden counters and \u201cshelves of food \u2026tended by store managers in dark vests, male store clerks in white aprons, and female clerks wearing long skirts and white blouses\u201d was a world where the corporate managers determined what Americans would have to eat and from whom they purchased it. More and more, this tended to be from one or another of the expanding grocery chain stores.<\/p>\n

Not that an independent grocer couldn\u2019t make it. \u201cCareful, intelligent grocers with fair credit can and do make good profits if conditions are at all favorable,\u201d economist E. M. Patterson assured readers in 1911. Butter and eggs comprised \u201cabout 36 percent of the grocer’s total sales and provided only 10 per cent profit. Flour yielded 16 percent \u201cbut ham, bacon and lard less than 5 per cent.\u201d Thing was, the majority of sales provided \u201cgross profit of only about 9 percent\u201d when 15 to 20 percent was needed to stay afloat.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Northwest Corner – 8th and Moore Streets. Milano’s Groceries, November 25, 1949 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Still, an independent grocer, no matter how dedicated or talented, couldn’t manage their way out of a discount situation created by the chains.\u00a0 As A & P\u2019s John A. Hartford would later put it: \u201cWe would rather sell 200 pounds of butter at 1 cent profit than 100 pounds at 2 cents profit.\u201d It might be \u201cgood for consumers, it was bad for the hundreds of thousands of retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers who needed high food prices in order to make a living.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Levinson, independent grocers \u201cwere being trampled in the price and premium wars” led by the big chains.<\/p>\n

At the start of the 20th<\/sup> century, the Great Atlantic & Pacific (later A & P) \u201copened an average of one store every two weeks and developed a network of more than 5,000 wagon routes for \u201ccommissioned salespeople driving Great Atlantic & Pacific horse carts\u201d throughout much of the United States.<\/p>\n

This market dominance paved the way for the rise of the supermarket after World War II. \u201cWhile consumer spending on food rose by half between 1945 and 1948, A&P\u2019s sales doubled and its profits trebled. In 1945, chains accounted for 31 percent of grocery sales. Just two years later, their share was 37 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

“The number of supermarkets nationwide, around two thousand in 1941, hit fifty-six hundred in 1948\u201d and the supermarket controlled \u201cone-quarter of all grocery sales.”<\/p>\n

The supermarket \u201cwas a national phenomenon.” But more to the detriment of places like Philadelphia, “it was a suburban phenomenon.” The city’s aging neighborhoods, with their failed and failing corner grocery stores, were transformed into food deserts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[Sources: Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America<\/em><\/a> (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); E. M. Patterson, “The Cost of Distributing Groceries,\u201d The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 50, (Nov., 1913), pp. 74-82.]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the 1920s, the average working-class family spent about one-third of its budget on groceries. \u201cMost households spent more to put dinner on the table than for their rent or their mortgage.” And where \u201cfood was hugely expensive, relative to wages\u201d neighborhood grocery stores delivered \u201conly moderate amounts of nutrition\u201d according to Marc Levinson. \u201cOnly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}