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New Yorkers Get Priced Out of Grocery Stores
By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted March 5, 2008.
Enormous accumulations of wealth are hitting New Yorkers where it really hurts -- at the deli counter.
In New York City, as TV's widely viewed Without a Trace series regularly reminds us, people disappear all the time. But something new, a headline revealed last week, is now disappearing in New York. Grocery stores.
Over the last six years, researchers report, the number of supermarkets in New York has shrunk by a third. Three of the city's top food chains -- D'Agostino, Gristedes, and Key Food -- "have each closed about a dozen stores since 2000."
Why are New York's supermarkets shutting down? No one needs to call in the FBI to investigate. Analysts already know the answer. New York is simply becoming too unequal -- too economically top-heavy -- to sustain the basics of modern American middle class life.
...
The inevitable result?
"The super rich," observes Queens College sociologist Andrew Beveridge, "are driving out the upper middle class, let alone the middle class."
Link
By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted March 5, 2008.
Enormous accumulations of wealth are hitting New Yorkers where it really hurts -- at the deli counter.
In New York City, as TV's widely viewed Without a Trace series regularly reminds us, people disappear all the time. But something new, a headline revealed last week, is now disappearing in New York. Grocery stores.
Over the last six years, researchers report, the number of supermarkets in New York has shrunk by a third. Three of the city's top food chains -- D'Agostino, Gristedes, and Key Food -- "have each closed about a dozen stores since 2000."
Why are New York's supermarkets shutting down? No one needs to call in the FBI to investigate. Analysts already know the answer. New York is simply becoming too unequal -- too economically top-heavy -- to sustain the basics of modern American middle class life.
...
The inevitable result?
"The super rich," observes Queens College sociologist Andrew Beveridge, "are driving out the upper middle class, let alone the middle class."
Link