WHQR's Sunday Edition is a free weekly newsletter delivered every Sunday morning. You can sign up for Sunday Edition here.
For the most part, I grew up in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, on a tree-lined suburban street of middle-class single-family homes. For us kids, it was about a half-mile walk to the ACME grocery store, for snacks and sodas, or about four minutes by bike. You could make a half-hour round trip out of it if you stopped to taunt the Catholic school kids for having to wear uniforms. Our parents, of course, made quicker work of it.
Despite the Greek root of the name, ACME wasn’t quite the absolute peak grocery shopping experience (and it never did seem to stock anti-Road Runner armaments, to our childish disappointment). It opened in the mid-60s, and looked like it, with its Rubik’s Cube color scheme, footprint about a third the size of newer stores, narrow aisles, and peeling linoleum floors. My parents sometimes called it the ‘Soviet ACME,’ based on its limited supply, but we didn’t want for the basics. Especially when money was tight, ACME got the job done.
By the time I was in high school, our family’s finances were more stable, and we’d been driving five to ten minutes to shop at the Pathmark, which was a little nicer. And there was John’s Friendly Market, a family-owned grocery store, which had an actual butcher and fresh produce in the summer (including tomatoes and corn I still think about).
My hometown could have been a stand-in for late 20th-century suburbia anywhere. (And, in fact, Steven Spielberg spent some time as a child one town over, in Haddon Township, which seemed to have made an aesthetic impression on him.) We were not rich, and there were no doubt challenging times my parents did a good job shielding us from. But overall we had it pretty good, privileged in ways that I only appreciated — I mean, like really appreciated — in retrospect.
Later, after I’d graduated and moved to college, the ACME closed in 2001, facing refurbishment costs topping $4 million. Despite competition from superstores and only being on a minor thoroughfare, The Trentonian noted that the store had remained profitable, catering in particular to seniors who didn’t have reliable transportation.
The location was converted to a CVS, which opened not long afterward.
Our Soviet ACME had held on as long as it could. Elsewhere in Camden County, similar grocery stores had gone out of business much earlier. Some of that had to do with post-industrial blight and crime in the City of Camden (which would become one of the most dangerous places in the country), but even in the ‘burbs, there was something else going on.
***
Today, Camden County is the largest and most severely impacted food desert in the state, according to New Jersey’s economic development authority. At least 45,000 residents live more than a mile from a grocery store with affordable, nutritious food, compounded by a lack of access to transportation. Many people, like my family, ended up living in a food desert, but because we had two cars, driving to the store wasn’t an impediment. We drove right through the desert and never saw it — but things were obviously different for other people, like those seniors who relied on our neighborhood store before it eventually closed.
For generations, many people used to rely on smaller chains, like ACME, and family-owned franchises and standalone stores. That started to change after 1981, when President Reagan directed the Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act (though it technically remained on the books), as part of his administration’s sweeping attempts at deregulation. The 1936 law had banned suppliers from giving undisclosed discounts to large chains over smaller competitors. Previously, large grocery chains had essentially bullied suppliers, who were afraid of losing their largest customers, into giving them preferential deals.
As economic strategist and advocate Stacy Mitchell wrote in The Atlantic a couple of years ago, the law worked relatively well.
“With discriminatory pricing outlawed, competition shifted onto other, healthier fronts. National chains scrambled to keep up with independents’ innovations, which included the first modern self-service supermarkets, and later, automatic doors, shopping carts, and loyalty programs. Meanwhile, independents worked to match the chains’ efficiency by forming wholesale cooperatives, which allowed them to buy goods in bulk and operate distribution systems on par with those of Kroger and A&P. A 1965 federal study that tracked grocery prices across multiple cities for a year found that large independent grocers were less than 1 percent more expensive than the big chains. The Robinson-Patman Act, in short, appears to have worked as intended throughout the mid-20th century,” Mitchell wrote.
Mitchell argues that, within a decade, and as a clear result of Reagan’s deregulation, the problem of food deserts as we know it now had emerged in places where those smaller businesses could no longer compete with the growing power of big-box stores, which could command better deals with suppliers and offer better prices.
Some experts disagree about the role the Robinson-Patman Act played, and you could also point to the explosion of residential subdivisions with no commercial components. Our ACME was across the street from shops and apartments, a block from single-family homes. Think of all the developments with hundreds of acres of houses, full of families who take it as a given that they’ll be driving to grocery stores (which have enormous parking lots to accommodate the shift away from walkable shopping).
But either way, the problem intensified, and by the mid-90s, the term “food desert” was actually coined.
Just one of the many neighborhoods that lost their local grocery store was Wilmington’s Northside, where the A&P shuttered, apparently in the late 1980s (the exact date has been difficult to pin down).
***
There have been many promises made and broken when it comes to addressing the Northside’s food desert. And for the better part of a decade, I’ve tracked the story of the Northside Food Co-op, an effort to bring a grocery store back to the neighborhood.
Since 2022, the Co-op has gone from a scrappy non-profit to a well-funded project, supported by the City of Wilmington, New Hanover County, and The Endowment, and, by all appearances, preparing to break ground. But that essentially all fell apart last year.
I won’t recount the whole story here, but as I wrote in December, it’s my sense that Republican leaders had long been uncomfortable with funding the Co-op, and even some Democrats worried about the long-term need for government support — at least in part because it invited the obvious question about what the city and county would do for other food deserts. But because no one locally wanted to be the one to break yet another promise to the Co-op, and because of increased — and I think justifiable —pressure to address racial injustice and inequality, a lot of people went along with it. When it became apparent that IRS regulations might prevent The Endowment from supporting the Co-op, that provided both a reason and a ‘bad guy’ – and the rest is history.
The Co-op leaders had to mourn their losses and look to new opportunities. While the county was talking austerity in a way that made it clear they were out of the grocery store game, the city, which now had an all-Democratic council following the 2025 election, seemed prime to take on progressive government interventions, like supporting a grocery store – but that hasn’t happened. Perhaps the moment has passed, or it’s a matter of waiting for the right opportunity, but — almost a year later — it’s not clear where the Co-op goes next.
In the meantime, New Hanover County and The Endowment pivoted to a different approach: a public-private partnership with Instacart to deliver food and medication to people living in the county’s eight food deserts. Families still pay for food, but the program covers the delivery fees and provides $10 a month to support the purchase of fresh groceries (including dairy, eggs, and produce).
Funded by a $1.2 million grant from The Endowment, the county is managing the two-year pilot project and determining eligibility. Essentially, participants need to live in a food desert, make less than 300% of the federal poverty level (around $99,000 for a family of four), with access to transportation factored in.
The program went live this month; residents can find more information and check their geographic eligibility here. The county’s chief health and human services officer, Tonya Jackson, encouraged anyone who thinks they might be on the ‘cusp’ of a food desert to apply. The county hopes to provide 2,000 memberships in the first year and increase the total to 3,000 in the second year.
***
New Hanover County’s program is based closely on a project launched in the fall of 2023 in Columbia, South Carolina. City officials, also working with Instacart, recently extended the initial two-year pilot for a third year.
This week, I spoke to Republican Mayor Daniel Rickenmann, who helped get Columbia’s program going. He told me the Instacart partnership actually came out of frustrations the city had after repeatedly trying, and failing, to stand up a public-private grocery store.
The city, which has roughly the same population as Wilmington, partnered with its housing authority. Rickenmann said the store was located in the heart of the housing authority district, but despite three different attempts, it never got enough traffic, and the site has now been vacant for seven years.
“Everybody said they wanted a grocery store, but then they weren't supporting that grocery store as much, right? And then, when you're dealing with fresh items and everything, the shelves started to get thinner, and so then we found a new operator who said he thought he could make it work, and ultimately what happened is there wasn’t enough support and density to support that, even though it was an area that really needed a grocery store,” he told me.
Rickenmann said “lesson learned,” but noted the city hasn’t sworn off the idea.
“We want to be very intentional when we do the next store, or participate or help, so that it's going to survive, because the biggest fear is we don't want to end up making it a permanent black site where people will never go, because, well, everything's failed there,” he said.
Rickenmann said he plans to visit the public private-grocery store launched in downtown Atlanta last year, the Azalea Fresh Market, backed by roughly $8 million in grants, loans, and cash.
“I know that in Atlanta, the store that they put downtown, they've had great success. I'm actually going to go see it next month,” he said. “So I'm a little bit curious to see: are they still supplementing that, or have they created enough density and users around it to keep it flowing, because grocery store margins are thin, so it's all about volume. And when you're dealing with fresh fruit, fresh meats, you've got to have people buying it, right?”
In the meantime, Rickenmann said Columbia is working to expand participation in the program in any way they can, including working with banks to get people accounts so they can use online or app-based payment systems. There’s also been efforts to teach people what to do with fresh produce, since many have never really cooked with that kind of ingredient (knowing how good parsnip fries are, for example, might change your mind about expanding your veggie palate).
The program started with around 370 families, but the city wants to increase that; the biggest challenge has been simply getting the word out. He said the city has worked hard to inform residents that the program will still give them the freedom to shop at their regular store and, at a more basic level, that it really will deliver what it promises. Recently, the city hired a marketing team to reach more people living in food deserts.
“Because there's been news stories on it. I mean, we've talked about it. We have flyers at our parks. We're using every tool we have. I look at the numbers of how many families I know are out there and how many are on SNAP, we could have more people in this program,” he told me.
Right now, the program is funded entirely by the city, but Rickenmann said they’re looking at public and private grants, including from the Walmart Foundation, to help support it long-term. He’s proud of his city’s food delivery program, and he said he thinks New Hanover County will be happy with results, too.
***
I get why people sometimes shrug at the issue of food deserts. They can be easy to write off as an inconvenience until you consider the knock-on impacts, the dramatically higher prices people pay at dollar stores, the nutritional deficits, the stress.
I started to wrap my head around the issue when Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in 2012. The Chinatown-adjacent Two Bridges neighborhood where my wife and I had lived for years was badly damaged, and the grocery store we’d been lucky to live close to — a Pathmark, actually — was completely submerged by the storm surge on the East River and totally destroyed. Grocery trips started involving much more planning, and fighting crowds on the subway with armloads of bags. Alternatively, you could pay through the nose for the limited stock at the corner bodega. Both options were tough on the many elderly folks living in our apartment.
Even after that, I didn’t fully understand food deserts until I started working at Port City Daily, where my colleague at the time, Olivia Parr, wrote a great series on the issue in early 2018.
Still, a lot of people didn’t get it or didn’t care. I suspect that’s because, as I said, food deserts don’t always jump out at you — you can drive right through one every day and never see it. Many people do just that. I did for decades.
The county’s program is just a week or two old, so it’s far too early to look for data supporting its success — but on paper it seems to address the problem of food deserts directly. You can imagine the relief of a low-income family or a senior on fixed income who struggles to get to the store or pharmacy. (I do wonder if the county will revisit the $10 monthly fresh food stipend, which with current prices gets you a few tomatoes or crowns of broccoli.)
The county is hiring a consulting firm, as yet unnamed, to help it gauge the program’s impact, but it will be interesting to consider ROI compared to other interventions — like building grocery stores or providing additional microtransit services.
Importantly, the program isn’t a substitute for the Northside Food Co-op, at least not the way its leaders have described its mission to me over the years. The Co-op was, of course, designed to address all the problems of a food desert, but it was also intended as a community gathering spot, a place for educational programming, and — as a cooperative that neighbors could literally invest in — a way for Northside residents to have a sense of ownership and control over their food access.
And it is, through that lens, easy to see a critique of the grocery delivery program. Instead of supporting a community group that was trying to fix their own problem, the county is now essentially funneling public money from the Endowment to a for-profit company, Instacart.
Forty-five years after Reagan’s free-market revolution, we’ve reached a strange and ironic inflection point. Deregulation suggested that, with the government out of the way, the market would allow companies to deliver better results to consumers. Instead, in this particular case, I think there’s strong evidence it created a problem that the government is now paying a $10-billion, publicly traded corporation to fix.
A broader version of that criticism is that The Endowment, tasked with creating ‘transformational change,’ has offered a short-term patch job. It’s not clear what happens when the two years of funding runs out. Jackson said the county hopes that if the program is successful, it can go back to The Endowment to discuss additional funding.
Say they got a 20-year extension. That would be good for people living in food deserts, but ultimately it wouldn’t address the underlying reasons for food deserts: economic inequality, inadequate public transportation, a K-shaped economy with limited options for jumping from service-industry gigs to better-paying jobs, and so on. It would be a nice boost for Instacart’s bottom line, though, with two decades of guaranteed customers.
To be fair, The Endowment has a lot of resources, but it's not all-powerful; it cannot shape national economic policy (it certainly can’t enforce the Robinson-Patman Act). But one hopes its long-term efforts stay focused on healing the wounds, not applying the Band-Aids.
It’s also worth noting, again, that the Northside Food Co-op only addressed one neighborhood, and there are many other food deserts in the county (and beyond, though that’s ‘off limits’ for The Endowment, at least for the foreseeable future). You could argue that, by taking one problem off the table for families in those areas, you give them the bandwidth to tackle other issues. Again, it’s early days, so I think it’s worth seeing how the pilot program actually works.
And, perhaps, one day the Northside Food Co-op will get its brick and mortar up out of the ground. And then — why not? — they could be one of the places delivering food through the program. It’s worth considering, since food deserts aren’t going anywhere, at least until we address the underlying issues. We’ve offered a temporary oasis, or maybe a small stream, which will provide much-needed relief, but we’re a long way from making rivers in the desert and transforming the landscape.