On Zohran’s government run grocery stores

Sophomore year

Sophomore year of college, I had moved out of the dorms and needed to feed myself. The nearest grocery store I knew of near the University of Minnesota’s main campus was a Cub Foods in midway. A grocery run via the bus would take me at least two hours.

This was far too tedious and I would end up getting most of my groceries when my family would visit campus and give me a ride.

Junior Year

In my junior year, the first Target Express opened near campus (Dinkytown area, where many students lived). I was very excited to have groceries within walking distance of my home. But when I walked in, I saw more rows dedicated to makeup than food. In those few rows, there was an abundance of ramen and pasta but very little fresh produce.

I didn’t work at Target corporate (and I never would after failing to secure an internship in my junior year), but it was safe to make the assumption that providing fresh produce was not profitable.

This Target Express was the very first and I’m sure they wanted to ensure it would be profitable. And in fairness to Target, it was still a tremendous benefit to students for all the other things they sold (I bought a number of vitamins from the pharmacy for less than I would have at CVS).

Senior Year

The University had a student nutrition group that ran several programs. Their most notable: they would take some university owned vans and drive students to the grocery store. You would sign up and the cars would pick you up at a specific time on the weekend. They would also provide nutrition guidance at the grocery store to help you eat healthy. It was an amazing student led service.

Senior year of college, I wanted to expand this program as a part of student government. I wanted larger university busses to run a route all around campus each week and take students to the grocery store.

In short, I accomplished this. I’ll spare you the months of planning, odd meetings I had on the edge campus with the university bus department, the drawing and redrawing of route maps, and funding conversations I had with Cub Foods.

Yes, we did manage to bring a number of students to the grocery store. The person we hired to draw the route map also lived in the area and even ended up using the service! I received a number of heartfelt thanks from students and I even ended up on the local news—sadly this footage and news article is long lost.

We’ll skip to the end of the story: the program was a failure.

A Grocery Store Shuttle of Dreams

There were a number of issues with route and schedule inconsistency. Drivers did not wait long enough at each stop and did not adhere to the route schedule due to heavy traffic near the grocery store on the weekends. For these reasons, it simply wasn’t convenient enough to meet every student’s schedule; the cost per passenger was far too high. It might have even been cheaper to have every student Uber themselves to Cub Foods and forward us the bill for the cost.

The cherry on top of this was when one of the shuttle drivers was listening to Rush Limbaugh in the car and a student very reasonably complained. I know that the program ran for one more semester after my graduation until Cub Foods no longer wanted to fund it.

My idealized vision of “give people an easy way to get to the grocery store and they will come” did not come to fruition. No Grocery Store Shuttle of Dreams for me.

The Future

I don’t see this program as a complete failure. While financially nonsensical, it was a worthy experiment. With some iteration, it could have found success. But a student government organized and charity funded enterprise didn’t have that kind of flexibility. It didn’t help that I graduated right after the program launched.

A year or two after my graduation, I knew a Trader Joe’s was set to be built close to campus (funny enough I met with then councilmember and current mayor Jacob Frey about this). Trader Joe’s is no paragon of fresh produce, but it’s a big step up from ramen at Target.

From reading this article, it looks like my successors in student government have continued to do great work on this issue. They seemed to have created their own bus program, shuttling the groceries to the students instead of the other way around. I’m mad I didn’t think of this! But from what I can find, it’s not entirely clear if it still exists.

When I was interviewed for the local news, the reporter asked me if I thought the food desert would ever be addressed in the area. My answer was cynical. I didn’t expect it to happen.

The Present in NYC

I’m not an expert on access to affordable and healthy food, I was just a college student who wanted to fix the problem. But I think my cynicism was warranted. Ten years later, I live in a different city but there are many areas of NYC that are food deserts. This is because privately run grocery stores aren’t profitable enough. The grocery stores near me in lower Manhattan are quite expensive; I’m not sure how the NYU students that live nearby afford it.

If I was still a student today, something has gone terribly wrong considering I’m on year 13 of undergrad. But I would try to advocate for the university to run a grocery store. It would have been a significantly more difficult and long-term endeavor, but it would have been worth lobbying for.