Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson and members of the Common Council are deliberately ignoring why grocery stores close in high-crime areas.
Milwaukee city officials on Monday announced a plan to combat what they term “food apartheid,” but noticeably ignored the high rates of retail theft that have forced grocery stores to leave the city.
Common Council members Russell Stamper and Andrea Pratt outlined three key initiatives at a press conference outside a grocery store on W. Lisbon Ave. They want to enact an ordinance requiring grocery stores and pharmacies to give the city 60 days’ notice before closing while formally declaring food apartheid a public health emergency in the city.
That would mirror a similar action the Milwaukee County Board took late last year, but it does nothing to address the systemic issues preventing grocery stores and other food retailers from operating in many parts of the city long-term.
According to the Food Industry Association, the average profit margin for an American grocery store is just 1.7%, while stores lose a significant amount of their products to “shrinkage.” This term refers to any loss of product (including spoilage, spillage, and theft) but grocery stores are notoriously subject to high rates of shoplifting. With such razor-thin profit margins, even a slight increase in a store’s shrink rate can have catastrophic consequences.
Yet neither the alders nor Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson addressed this issue in their calls for grocery stores to remain in the city and did not include increased arrests and prosecutions for shoplifting as part of their solutions to the “food apartheid” problem.
Instead, Johnson proposed using more taxpayer dollars through Milwaukee’s Commercial Revitalization Fund to help stores with maintenance costs. He admitted, however, that he was still unsure where the additional revenue to support this fund would come from.
