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Hello everyone, my name is Charmaine. I own a little convenience store on 532 N Montford Ave, and I have owned this store for the past 15 years with my family. I flew in today to talk about why adding healthy food options to convenience stores such as my own is not a great idea. The Federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, best known as SNAP or food stamps is a program that was designed to help over 40 million low-income Americans put food on their table every month. To help with this problem of fighting against hunger, the United States Department of Agriculture best known as the USDA proposed a regulation that required SNAP retailers to provide a better variety of healthy foods. You are probably thinking that it is a smart idea, but the proposal wasn’t helping anyone. You see just because you make healthy food accessible, doesn’t mean that people will actually purchase it.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health decided to create a program that would increase the supply of healthy foods in stores hoping that it would increase consumer demands. On April 22, 2016, the Baltimore Healthy Stores Program, led by Dr. Joel Gittelsohn began. The program wanted to do a trial run before diving right into it, so they took nine convenience stores including mine, and we became the test subjects for selling healthy foods.
I can honestly tell you that it was the worst my store has done when it comes to profits. Nobody purchased the healthy food I stocked, and the consumers complained that the foods were either too expensive or of poor quality. I hit financial rock bottom because the fresh foods that I stocked were rotting away while consumers completely ignored them. Offering healthy foods in neighborhood stores isn’t enough to change eating behaviors on its own. People have to want to buy and eat the food, too. One reason that no one is buying any healthy food is because of germs. Germs already spread pretty fast in grocery stores, it will spread like the plague in a convenience store. From letting kids touch the produce, which we all know that children are at the top of the list when it comes to daily social contacts, making them most at risk for catching and spreading infections, to grown adults who sneeze and cough into their hands and then rummage through the product without a care in the world. I know the majority of people want to wash their produce before eating it, but where will you do that in a convenience store …in the bathroom? I don’t know about you but that sounds disgusting and unsanitary. People will cause food contamination, and then try to blame it on the store owners when really it’s everyone but the store owner. This program was just causing my store to suffer through some foolish experiment that was causing me to take the beating rather than the program itself. I was doing perfectly fine before this program because I was selling things that people wanted to eat when they were on the go. Convenience stores aren’t meant to sell healthy foods, we sell speed of service to busy consumers who want to get in and out quickly. Now, I am barely on the cusp of survival and my store may not last much longer. You’ll end up with food environments in which many convenience stores are closed, including my own. So there’s a danger that if these efforts to change the food environment are not implemented correctly, they could actually worsen the food environment. This is why you can’t vote to pass this policy, not only will you be taking away the business of many convenience stores, but you’ll also be taking away money I earn to put food on my table for my family.
There are many other ways to help low-income families get the nutritious foods they want, according to foodtrust.org. Further retail outlets can be added, such as markets for producers, stands for traders, and public markets. More buses could also be provided to the grocery stores and farmers ‘ markets.
Instead of implementing a policy requiring convenience stores to sell healthy food options, you can create a policy that encourages local efforts to develop more neighborhood grocery stores and other fresh food retail outlets without access to healthy food.
Several methods for estimating food retail demand in underserved communities have been developed. Research using local data sources shows that these areas have the capacity to accommodate thousands of square feet of additional food retail space. One study estimated $8.7 billion in annual food loss in communities in the inner city. The effect of new supermarkets on surrounding real estate values has also been studied by some. When new food retailers reach pre-retail areas, they will add profitability to the commercial real estate markets in urban neighborhoods and change the perception that economically distressed urban areas are undesirable places to operate.
‘Recent analyses of efforts to bring new grocery stores to underserved communities have found such businesses to be successful (even thriving), provide a good selection of healthy and affordable products, and contribute significantly to local economic growth. Four years after its opening, a review of the first full-service supermarket to be located in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City (thanks in part to a $2.5 million loan from the city to cover construction costs) found that the store allocated the same amount of space to a similar variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, fish and meat at similar prices as typical suburban supermarkets. The store has been credited with catalyzing the revitalization of the neighborhood.”
The Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI) reports, a collaborative public-private initiative that helped develop 78 supermarkets and other fresh food outlets in underserved urban and rural areas, also show the positive effects of healthy food retailing. Besides increasing access for nearly 500,000 residents to healthy food, the campaign resulted in:
Creation of a work. The program created or preserved 4,860 state-wide jobs. A recent case study of selected supermarkets in the Philadelphia area found that the vast majority of jobs generated by the initiative were filled by residents living within three miles of their workplace. A new store funded by the initiative that is part of the national ShopRite chain produced 258 jobs and local residents filled more than half of them. If you factor in the additional jobs created by the multiplier effect of a new store, the total number of jobs becomes much higher: one grocery store is reported to have directly and indirectly created 660 jobs.
It also resulted in the production of the economy. New and enhanced grocery stores can catalyze a community’s commercial revitalization. An evaluation of the economic impacts of five new stores opened with FFFI assistance showed that total employment around the supermarket grew at a faster rate than developments across the region for four of the stores. It means that the introduction of a new supermarket will have a positive effect on overall economic activity.
This is why you shouldn’t pass a policy that requires convenience stores to sell healthy food, you should pass a policy that helps with the development of more grocery stores.
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