I've lived in Englewood. I can confirm a lack of quality produce - I'd have to travel to Hyde Park, Chinatown or the South Loop for that. However, I doubt Whole Foods will draw too many neighborhood customers away from the Food-4-Less or Aldi. Price matters.<p>The Englewood location is probably more about cheap land near the I-90/94, which links downtown Chicago to the South Side, and south suburbs. This location is also close to the Hyde Park (University of Chicago) and Woodlawn neighborhoods, which are more affluent.
My wife and I are very much into knowing where our food came from, how it was raised/produced, etc. As you can imagine, we shop primarily at Whole Foods (outside of our CSA). We are also interested in making sure we buy these products at the best possible prices. So we routinely cross-shop at places like Marianos and even Jewel for these items. Interestingly, the cost of these types of items are almost always cheaper at Whole Foods than anywhere else. I think Marianos and Jewel mark these items up much higher because they take up precious shelf space and tend to move more slowly than the non-organic and/or mass-produced items. Just something to be aware of. If you're concerned about where your food came from, Whole Foods is actually not overpriced. If you look at how European families spend money on groceries proportional to their income, I think the Whole Foods model is more in line with that than the familiar American model. I'd have to Google the numbers, but I believe American families spend roughly 10% of their income on food, whereas Europeans will spend 15-20% of their income.<p>With all that being said, surely this is a huge risk on Whole Food's part, and I'm not quite sure how it will turn out. I enjoy that there is probably some portion of idealism in this move and I hope it works for both WF and more importantly the residents.
This is a really huge deal. Englewood is a hurting neighborhood and community. These food deserts are real. Children in these areas sometimes grow up eating out of vending machines because there aren't any alternatives. I'm not a romantic, but having had some firsthand experience, these situations are really tragic.<p>It wouldn't surprise me if this was a package deal with the new Whole Foods opening in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago.
Never thought I would stick up for Whole Foods, but their
price on the basics(milk, butter, some bread, flour) is
cheaper/same price than Safeway. Their bulk food section
is overpriced. I'm not sure why they overprice the bulk
foods; I think they figure we can't do the math? Examlpe:
Lumberg rice is cheaper than WF bulk rice? If anyone from
Whole Foods reads this, and I imagine everyone of these
posts are going to be dissected my management--get rid of
the Security Guards. If you are that conserved about theft,
use undercover guards.
"an 18,000-square-foot Whole Foods."<p>18,000 is actually small for a supermarket and in fact the average Whole Foods is 38,000 square feet:<p><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/whole_foods_market_inc/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/whole_...</a>
They only mention SNAP in passing, but I guarantee it features large on the spreadsheets back at HQ. Everyone I've known who was on it seemed a little nostalgic about buying expensive food they wouldn't normally. (However, my sample size is two).
Whole Foods also opened the first full supermarket in downtown Detroit. Imagine a city of 700,000 people without a single supermarket.<p>Course they received millions in subsidies to do it. But the program was out there for awhile and no other supermarket chain would take the chance.<p>Whole Foods success was followed by other chains. However the other chains took the subsidies and built their supermarkets out on 8 mile which is the dividing line between Detroit and the suburbs. While the stores are technically within Detroit the suburbs are right across the street so their risk was much lower.
With the shift in other supermarkets carrying more organic and "luxury" items like Jewel and Mariano's purchasing Dominick's locations and building stores that carry a wide range of organic to normal shelf items, Whole Foods isn't the high end gem it once was. You can now get the things you got there at regular stores (that have more acceptable pricing). My guess is this is putting pressure on Whole Foods' growth strategy.
Putting a Whole Foods in Englewood is fraught for the same reason it would be in Humboldt Park (well, minus the gentrification issue).<p>Go to Jimenez or Del Rancho and check out the produce section: it's comparable in size to a Whole Foods, but stocked very differently. You can find a small tub of lemongrass or buddhas hand citrus at Whole Foods, along with a small tub of jalapenos and maybe a plaintain. You can't find buddhas hand at Jimenez at all, but fresh peppers are stacked floor to ceiling.<p>Produce variety at Jimenez is poorer than Whole Foods. But quantity is much greater, and quality is higher. Jimenez does a better job at stocking the ingredients people in their neighborhood actually use.<p>Similarly: you can get cheap-cheap-cheap top round or ground pork or skirt or chorizo at Del Rancho. You can't get hanger steak, air-chilled cage-free chicken, or 15 varieties of chicken-apple sausage.<p>Having a serious grocery store in Englewood is an unalloyed good thing, no matter whether they choose to stock Organic Valley Sour Cream or Salvadoran <i>crema</i> (the crema is better, by the way). But if Whole Foods really wants to help the south side, they're going to have run a different kind of Whole Foods. It would be really neat to see them try.
"Nor is it a bet, by Whole Foods, on neighborhood change."<p>Although, if the neighborhood did happen to gentrify, as has been the goal of the Emanuel administration for Chicago as a whole, that would be a happy coincidence.
This is super exciting. I was disappointed by one pull quote: "This is not an experiment. African American people are not an experiment,” Thompson says. “People need to stop thinking like that, that we cannot afford the things that people in other communities have.”<p>The fact is: this is a poor community, and the accepted wisdom is that they can't have nice things. This is indeed an experiment to show that that accepted wisdom is <i>wrong</i>. There's nothing wrong with doing experiments: we do them all the time, whether it's testing drugs or the work of economists like Esther Duflo, these are crucial. And I sure hope if throws sand back in the face of those who have given up on these communities.
I hope that (assuming the demographics really do skew poor and food stamps) that the cashiers aren't mandated to harass the cusomters with WFs bullshit charities.
I used to work at the Palo Alto WF for 4 years, and a couple of times a year there were periods where it was mandatory for cashiers to ask customers about WFs latest bullshit charity schemes-like the Whole Planet Foundation, etc. It was bad enough doing that in rich PAMPA, but hopefully the store management has a bit more flexibility opening up in freaking Detroit (assuming its not a store heavily visited by 28 year old start up employees with obscene amounts of money).
I do not know about Chicago or Englewood, so I do not have much to comment on this particular stuff, but riding on the theme - I work across a Whole Foods and across the street are many low-income apartments, I did not find many people from those apartments shopping or working at whole foods. If their desire is to address food deserts this store has to be completely different from their standard configuration and unless that is not the case, this is either well-intentioned yet misguided effort or calculated low cost land acquisition.
On the topic of Whole Foods: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609515" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609515</a>
"<i>The neighborhood was targeted by the city as a "food desert," although corner stores are common and discount-grocer Aldi's is just down the street.</i>"<p>My corner shops and my local Aldi must be unusual. No problem sourcing fresh produce at reasonable prices (UK).<p>I wonder if anyone is looking out for the corner shop people.