120
SNAP benefit delays could mean millions go hungry - despite Americans wasting almost $400 billion of food a year
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
120 points (96.2% liked)
News
33010 readers
2903 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
City owned grocery stores don't really solve the affordable food problem.
Grocery stores aren't particularly profitable in the scheme of things. Neither are distributors, food processors, or farmers.
Each link takes a bit of profit of course, but for most non-luxury foods there's just not a lot of profit along the line.
In order to solve it for real, you need to a) make farming cheaper, especially for certain labour intensive foods b) control the entire supply chain from farm to grocery store
However, this tends not to work well for any sort of non-commodity food item like say cookies or ice cream. There are just too many different preferences for that to work well. The government could produce 3 types of cookies really cheap, but if they tried to produce even 30 different types they'd just end up being worse than what we currently have and we currently have 300 types.
I agree that city-owned grocery stores won't solve the food affordability problem on their own. I do take issue with this statement though:
That's bullshit. 🙂
Kroger posted ~$150,039,000,000 in revenue, ~$33,364,000,000 in gross profit, and ~$2,164,000,000 net profit for 2025. They posted a gross profit margin of ~22% and a net profit margin of ~2%.
That's pretty profitable. Profitable enough for the CEO to walk away with ~$15,400,000 of it. That's not as profitable as economic abortions like FAANG but I'd argue nothing should be.t
Even if it weren't: we don't have to make farming cheaper or control the entire supply chain. The issue is primarily top-down. Not bottom-up.
If, after we enforce the paying of livable wages, a crop is too labor-intensive to be economically sustainable then we ought to either subsidize that expense because we collectively agree that's the best option OR stop mass-producing the inefficient food.
Capping C-level salaries to a reasonable percentage of the company's lowest paid worker and capping profit per-item based on total cost to create, process, house, and distribute each item to retailers would be much more effective means of lowering the cost of groceries nationally.
Corporate logistics, especially for perishables, already have all of this information and more. It's how they know how much they can gouge the consumer (or what price to set if colluding in price-fixing schemes).
City-owned grocery stores don't solve the whole problem. No single solution can. It's a good beginning for the effort though. Starting with the top-end of the stack, where most of the waste occurs purely due to corporate and individual greed, makes sense and sets the stage for addressing other systemic issues within that industry's supply chains.
The cookie variety concern also seems misplaced to me. Though you didn't list it as a blocker. Just a problem these kinds of solutions can't solve.
I agree. I don't see why a municipal grocer would need to match the variety offered by the private sector though. Their aim is to provide consistent access to safe and affordable staple food stuffs. Not help Nabisco weasel into additional market segments so numbers go up and make investors happy. The municipal grocer should only care about making their laborers and shoppers happy. We don't need cookies for that! Though I'd bet putting a handful of options from locally-owned bakers on the shelves would help.
I would be OK with losing out on random novelty hotdog-flavored chips.
That being said, you could get around this problem by focusing on staples (rice, flour, vegetables, salt, etc.) since the vast majority of folks don't really have a preference on this sort of thing, aside from allergies/gluten free.