Inner-City Plea Heeded by Grocers : Retail: The industry is expected this week to launch its first drive for more stores and economic support in low-income urban communities.
Yearning for the service and lower prices found in more affluent areas, inner-city residents for decades have been urging grocery chains to build more stores in their neighborhoods.
Now there are signs that the supermarket industry is beginning to respond on a national level.
When the heads of many of the nation’s supermarket chains convene today for their annual Food Marketing Institute convention in Chicago, industry leaders are expected to ask them to help develop economic projects for distressed urban neighborhoods.
Spurred largely by the 1992 Los Angeles riots, this will be the first industrywide effort to provide more stores and economic support in poorer urban communities.
The details will not be released until today, but FMI’s “urban initiatives” campaign will also ask its member companies to develop education and job-training programs for “at-risk” inner-city youth. FMI is a trade organization that includes chain supermarket operators and owners of private, individual groceries.
“As an industry, we have never tried to pull together to address these problems,” said Karen Brown, an FMI vice president. “We’re taking an industrywide approach now.”
Some longtime critics of the supermarket industry question the sincerity of its nascent urban initiatives movement.
“I’m skeptical because the proof is in the pudding, and this industry has a shameful record,” said John Gamboa, head of the San Francisco-based Greenlining Coalition, a statewide group that opposes the discriminatory business practice known as redlining.
“That trade association has not focused on the African-American community in the past and there is good reason to doubt their intentions,” said Danny Bakewell, head of the Brotherhood Crusade, a Los Angeles-based social services group. “If (FMI) has influence, they could pick up the phone, call some chains and we would see markets in places like the corner of Crenshaw and Slauson.”
On the other hand, Rebuild L.A. believes that FMI is already beginning to make a difference. RLA Co-Chairman Peter Ueberroth met with FMI members earlier this year and told them that the supermarket industry was taking the lead private-sector role in the urban revitalization movement.
FMI officials said Los Angeles-based Vons Cos. has provided some of the impetus for the trade group’s urban campaign. In the wake of the riots last July, Vons announced that it would launch a $100-million plan to build grocery stores in neglected inner-city areas over the next five years. It plans to build 10 to 12 new stores in those areas.
Vons Chairman Roger Stangeland, who has just started a two-year term as FMI chairman, said his company actually began in 1991 planning more stores in underserved areas.
Ironically, the Los Angeles riots occurred while Stangeland was attending last year’s FMI convention in Chicago. Stangeland said FMI began to focus more on urban issues as a result of the unrest in Los Angeles.
Stangeland said Vons executives conferred in Chicago during the Southland disturbances and decided to accelerate the company’s expansion timetable.
“We concluded that there was an enormously dense population that we were not serving adequately or not serving at all,” Stangeland said. “On the other hand, we realized we had been considering sites in the hinterland that had more jack rabbits than people.”
Indeed, the 1 million residents of southern Los Angeles have remained underserved consumers in the 28 years since the Watts riots first called attention to the economic and social inequities of the city’s minority neighborhoods.
In an area recently examined by The Times--a region bounded by the Santa Monica Freeway to the north, the communities of Inglewood and Hawthorne on the west, Gardena and Compton on the south and Watts and part of Vernon on the east--there was one supermarket for every 15,198 people. In contrast, there was one supermarket for every 11,929 people countywide.
Not all food chains have spurned the inner city. Boys and Viva--owned since 1989 by La Habra-based Food 4 Less Supermarkets--have operated in southern Los Angeles and neighboring communities for more than seven decades.
Food 4 Less--which also operates Alpha Beta and Food 4 Less stores--now has 30 outlets in the area examined by The Times. Another three stores in that area--damaged during the 1992 riots--will reopen when repairs are completed. In the same region there are four Vons, three Lucky stores and two Ralphs.
Food 4 Less President George Golleher said many grocery chains have been missing an opportunity to make profits in underserved communities.
Food 4 Less is developing two new stores in southern Los Angeles and another new store in East Los Angeles.
“After the Watts riots, many (supermarket) chains left those areas,” he said.
“We thought it made good business sense to stay in those areas, and we were right. We wouldn’t be there if it didn’t make good financial sense.”
Indeed, some civic leaders are successfully selling supermarkets on the notion that they can improve their bottom line by setting up shop in inner-city neighborhoods.
Consider the situation in West Las Vegas, a predominantly minority community that many Las Vegans characterize as underserved.
“Three years ago, we asked the people (in the area) what they needed, and a supermarket was a top priority,” Las Vegas Mayor Jan Laverty Jones said during a recent interview with The Times.
However, the mayor took a more unconventional approach to attracting supermarket industry interest.
Jones decided to try to persuade Vons to build a store in West Las Vegas after conferring with her brother, Roger Laverty--who is president of the Santa Barbara-based Smart & Final warehouse store chain.
Smart & Final, which sells bulk food items at discount prices, does not compete directly with mainstream supermarkets. However, the company has been profitable in underserved areas. Laverty said he urged his sister to contact Vons after talking to a number of Southland grocery store chains.
Jones made the call, and Vons recently decided to build a supermarket at a West Las Vegas shopping center being developed by a partnership involving former Laker basketball star Earvin (Magic) Johnson.
Some West Las Vegas residents are also pleased because they will have opportunities to open their businesses at the new shopping center.
In addition, shopping center enterprises will hire from that community and there will even be educational incentives. Vons plans to pay its stock people overtime if they spend extra time studying and doing homework at the store.
“In general, supermarkets haven’t done a good job of serving the inner city,” Laverty said. “Communities understand when you are catering to their needs and when you are giving them lip service.”
