Opened in 2023 to fill a food desert, this Sentry Foods is now closing:
Less than three years after it opened to fill a food desert on Milwaukee’s northwest side, the Sentry Foods at 6350 West Silver Spring Drive is abruptly closing its doors.
The closure is the latest in a swath of grocery stores shutting down across the city, largely affecting lower income neighborhoods with little access to fresh foods. An Aldi store just two miles away shuttered last week, and other neighborhoods have protested Pick ‘n Save closures.
I thought about the address, and that’s the shopping center across the street from Westlawn (now, apparently, reconstructed as Westlawn Gardens) which was one of the sister housing developments to Berryland, the projects in which I lived. Didn’t get out that way much when I lived in Berryland–I guess my dad’s friend Gene lived a couple blocks east of it and north–but I passed the place when I was in school–I want to say it was a Kohl’s grocery store at the time, but land’s sakes, child, that was in the 1900s.
They quote a note attached to the door:
“This decision was not made lightly. Many factors were carefully considered before coming to this difficult conclusion. Saying goodbye is truly painful, and we are deeply sorry to bring this news to the community that has supported us over the years,” the notice reads.
But the rest of the article is mostly the usual food dessert, food dessert, food dessert nonsense, but no real analysis of why groceries struggle in those areas. Because if the real reasons were explained, people might not want the journalists’ preferred solutions.
What are the people buying? If it’s not fresh meat and fresh vegetables, but rather processed food, snacks, soda, beer, and cigarettes, you can buy those things at a convenience store. At a significant markup, sure, but you might need that markup in a grocery store to account for shrinkage, both due to theft and to spoilage of perishables.
And I get it from the customer side, too. I have schlepped a 25lb frozen turkey (my Christmas bonus) four miles from the store to my father’s house in the cold and the snow. You cannot carry a week’s worth of groceries several miles walking or on the bus, and making more frequent trips might take two or three hours or so, a huge time sink every day or couple of days.
Not sure what the solution is at the societal or government level–or if any such solution would make things better and not worse (except for those administering the solutions, of course–it’s always better for them), but at the individual level, it’s a strong social network or family ties.
