You can have diversity, or you can have free enterprise. But you can’t have both.
In Cincinnati, black “civil rights” groups are protesting Kroger’s decision to shut down a grocery store in a black area, because the store lost over a million dollars last year. Kroger’s decision is perfectly rational; no company can stay in business for long if it keeps outlets open that are bleeding cash. Company officials have explained this to the “civil rights” group, but to no avail. They’re still raising hell about Kroger shutting the store down.
And when I say that black groups are protesting the decision, don’t get the wrong idea. They’re not just asking the company to reconsider, or simply pleading with them to give the store just another year to turn around before pulling the plug. No; they’re saying Kroger has no right to shut the store down. A local supermarket is now a “civil right”, and Kroger should provide one to black people no matter how much it costs the company.
By shutting it down, they’re threatening the health of black people, which is a violation of their civil rights:
Kroger’s decision to close its Roselawn store could hurt residents’ health over the long haul, some community activists argue.
Those activists, including the Center for Closing the Health Gap and the Southern Christian Leadership Council Fred Shuttlesworth Chapter, are organizing an April 29 community meeting about the store closing and the issue of “food deserts” in Cincinnati. The meeting will start at 6 p.m. with a tentative location of Woodward High Career Technical High School, 7005 Reading Road, Roselawn.
Kroger announced Friday that the Hillcrest Shopping Center store will close Sunday, leaving Roselawn without a supermarket. Company officials blamed a loss of more than $1 million last year at that store, and an eroding customer base.
But Dwight Tillery, CEO of the Center for Closing the Health Gap in Avondale, said profit shouldn’t be the only issue when basic services are at stake.
“What we’re looking at here is a pattern of major grocers are abandoning the inner city neighborhoods which happen to be primarily minority people and poor people and elderly people,” Tillery said. “This has to be more than, ‘We’re not meeting our bottom line,’ because food, like water, is essential to the health and well being of our residents. You’re losing something that is very critical to people’s survival.”
There are no chain supermarkets at all in the entire city limits of Detroit, and most black areas of America have very few. There are lot of reasons for that, none of which have anything do do with “racism.” Theft, by both customers and employees, destroys the razor thin profit margins which grocery stores operate on. Robberies do the same thing. High crime in the area makes people reluctant to venture out at all. And for all the talk about the need for healthy fruits and vegetables in the inner city, that’s not what most of the people there are spending their money on.
But none of that matters to black “civil rights” groups. Local supermarkets are a right, not a privilege, and so there’s a lot more involved than just “the bottom line.” It doesn’t matter if the local supermarket loses $10 million a year; they have a moral obligation to stay open to serve non-whites.
And don’t think this is just a few “crazy hot heads” among the “civil rights” crowd. It’s not. It’s how the vast majority of blacks (and a large majority of Hispanics) think, which is why they vote 9-1 in favor of the big government candidates. There’s a reason you don’t see many black and brown people at the Tea Party protests. It’s not because of “racism”; Tea Partiers are desperately trying to attract blacks and Mexicans, to no avail. It’s because non-whites like big government. They think it’s society’s obligation to provide for them. And if a company is losing a million bucks a year in a black area, that’s just too bad, because access to a local supermarket is now a “civil right.”
Get used to it, folks.
Because, even though right now it’s just talk, it won’t stay that way. Each passing year brings new frontiers in “civil rights”, and this is going to be one of the big ones in the near future. Just as Al Sharpton and “conservative” Newt Gingrich are calling the test scores gap between blacks and whites “the civil rights issue of the 21st century”, which would have sounded crazy just a few years ago. And I guarantee you that in the not too distant future you’re going to see lawsuits challenging the right of companies to close stores, or not open them, in the inner cities.
And if, as virtually everyone agrees, the government has the authority to force a mom & pop restaurant in the backwoods of Mississippi to serve blacks whether they want to or not, on what basis can we insist it doesn’t have the authority to force Kroger to maintain stores in black communities?
Just as a company is now presumed guilty of “racial discrimination” if the percentage of non-whites they hire is lower than the percentage living in the local area, supermarkets and other big retailers are going to start facing the same legal scrutiny. Hucksters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton will team up with lawyers like Cass Sunstein, Lawrence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz to start suing these companies for “corporate racism”, based on the fact that the percentage of their outlets in black areas are nowhere near the black percentage of the country’s population. And as America gets increasingly Diverse, and so do our judges and juries, they are going to win.
Just wait and see.