Zohran Mamdani’s political surge in New York City, of course, has a grocery store element.
Soaring prices, faded services, and eroded humanity are an industry-wide trend that is hitting hardest in America’s largest, busiest, most expensive cities.
With this month’s nearly overnight closure of the Broadway Whole Foods only the latest major grocery corporation cutback in the city, don’t look to Seattle leadership to champion city-run grocery stores — yet.
“I’m not looking to legislate anything,” District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth told CHS about her comments following the rapid shutdown of the Broadway at Madison Whole Foods two weeks ago.
The Broadway closure came as the Amazon-run company said “performance and growth potential” were behind the decision. CHS reported that a massive $173 million real estate deal and a Whole Foods-friendly lease clause were also in play.
The seven-year-old, two-level, 40,000-square-foot grocery at the base of The Danforth luxury apartment building now sits empty, joining the shuttered former Amazon Fresh only a few blocks away on E Pike on Capitol Hill’s sad roster of major empty commercial spaces.
Hollingsworth said she is concerned about the loss.
“Losing a grocery store and a critical food access point is a real blow to our community,” the first-term representative for Capitol Hill and the Central District said on social media following CHS’s report on the Whole Foods shutdown. “We know the remaining three stores on Broadway are also facing challenges. I’ve constantly been elevating these concerns as our grocery stores are not just businesses, they’re lifelines.”
The three groceries Hollingsworth references include two remaining QFCs on Broadway and the 2022-born M2M “urban convenience” concept store from Asian supermarket giant H Mart.
A third QFC is closed and lined up for demolition to make way for a new six-story mixed-use development on 15th Ave E that is unlikely to include a return of a major grocer. The 15th at John Safeway, meanwhile, will eventually be demolished, too, as the company’s property at the corner is redeveloped as two new five-story buildings including a new grocery, around 330 market rate apartment units, some new, smaller retail spaces, and an underground parking lot for more than 300 cars. A Safeway also serves the area at 22nd and Madison.
There are also worries in the Central District where one of three remaining Amazon Fresh-brand supermarkets in the city now holds down the corner where major redevelopment replaced the neighborhood’s Red Apple grocery store. The 2021-opened 23rd and Jackson Amazon Fresh is now one of the last of its kind after the company’s most recent shutdown cut more than 100 jobs in Federal Way.
Grocery delivery revenue, meanwhile, has continued to grow, raising the bar for in-store performance. While Whole Foods is referring shoppers to its other area stores, it is also reminding that customers “can shop Amazon.com/grocery for a broad selection of 3 million grocery and household essentials.”
Hollingsworth, who has been a champion of food security and proponent of Black ownership of farmlands and food-focused businesses, says the grocery issue is a priority in her office and that she is working with city departments and King County to address issues and “explore every avenue to protect and support these essential businesses for our residents.”
For now, it seems unlikely Hollingsworth is looking toward New York for guidance. Among Democratic mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani’s proposals for lowering the cost of living in NYC is a promise to cut subsidies to massive grocery chains and redirect the funding to create a network of city-owned grocery stores that will sell at wholesale prices and “operate without a profit motive.”
In Seattle, the grocery chains are currently exempt from the city’s payroll tax on its largest employers.
Grocery access is also a core element of the city’s “Food Action Plan” that Hollingsworth is working to shape and implement though most of the city’s $30 million a year program is already dedicated to programs like Fresh Bucks which provides $40 stipends to income-qualifying residents to spend on fresh produce from participating retailers as well as the framework for the city’s food programs and community P-Patch gardens.
Hollingworth tells CHS she is not currently pursuing any legislation to address the issues, instead focusing on working out better coordination with departments like Public Health and public service departments.
“I don’t have an answer but trying to establish better forms of communication for our grocery stores and city/county departments,” Hollingsworth said.
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Hopefully another market comes into that space but not sure what even would. Target (maybe before but not these days), PCC, Metro Market or it will sit vacant for years.
You all will have plenty of places to buy nasty expired food from capitalist chains, don’t worry
Not likely given King County and Seattle’s plan to turn this area into Seattle’s version of the Tenderloin with the giant regional facility for drug addicts with psychosis.
It’s not like that area is short of grocery stores is it? There’s a QFC 2 blocks away from where the Whole Foods was and the Co-op and Trader Joes just along Maddison – and that ignores the Safeway (that admittedly is closing) and another QFC not much further away.
Shouldn’t this all have been foreseeable with a business plan and tax information?
QFC apparently 9wants to close the two stores on Broadway also.
City run grocery stores — customer service expertise from the DMV, produce management by the Department of Revenue. Can’t wait.
The DMV runs fine here thank you very much, and a city run grocery store would just undercut private prices due and pass the savings of being a gov institution onto the customers. That sounds awesome and you’re silly not to support it, unless you own a grocery chain?? Didn’t think so lol. Nice of you to say hello from the land of political insults circa 1985 though
You have to go to a third party company for your license plate
You’re misunderstanding a lot of things here and I don’t know what point you’re trying to make…are you talking about tabs maybe??
The decision to offer tabs through contracts with licensing and registration businesses is a political decision based partly on elected officials’ decision to not to collect enough taxes to properly fund government institutions in full. I personally think we should offer all those services through government offices at main and satellite locations exclusively, but unfortunately, it’s easier on the budget to dump some clerical work onto private businesses than to pay full salary and benefits to additional government employees. But that by no means indicates that any part of our vehicle registration or licensing is somehow a “third party” program not directly the government managing and executing…it’s the government keeping track of your car and your standing as a driver. Do you think it’s a third party that shares your registration info with police data systems?? Do I renew my tabs on a 3rd party company site??? Can I renew my tabs with outstanding tickets? No! And tickets to who btw…not private third party companies. Your understanding of this issue is completely muddled.
It’s the government that runs our vehicle infrastructure, virtually in its entirety, so your point is completely moot. And don’t even get me started on the Defense Commissary Agency
The government can offer basic foods and “luxury” foods in a market, incredibly easily, and does so all over the world.
Joy Hollingsworth, yet again, making it known that she’s completely politically inept when there’s such massive precedent for this great idea that Zohran is putting forward, and so much popularity behind the idea of “cheaper groceries”. FFS!!!
Neither of those are City departments, and in Washington, it’s the Department of Licensing, not the DMV.
Personal anecdotes are not scientific data, but is everyone really having these godawful experiences at the DMV? I upgraded to the Real ID in under ten minutes, and the lady helping me couldn’t have been nicer. No idea if city-run grocery stores would prove feasible, but the oppo research will have to do better than a hackneyed “what’s the deal with airline food?” cliché.
This kind of service occurs without good funding from. The city or state. You should possibly open your eyes to a new era of city and state officials who allow real changes in a city.
The dmv bullshit is handed to you by corporations who want you to believe that governments are incompetent, and their workers are assholes who sit on their ass, all while lobbying to destroy municipal services.
You’re the kind of person who screams at a postal worker because theyre not doing things fast enough for you, or god forgive, not in the best mood so they are terse, not unfriendly. Get bent. Support workers.
“I’m not looking to legislate anything” could be council member Hollingsworth’s calling card
PLEASE YES
Can’t wait to experience the joys of this…
(Even Safeway, at its suckiest sounds better)
LOL we saw it under private business just a few years ago…capitalism during crisis (at its finest!)
For a couple of weeks until people stopped panicking buying and hoarding toilet paper… there never was an actual TP shortage, just a run on the stock on hand. There were temporary shortages of thing mainly because people started shopping differently.. Stores actually adjusted pretty quickly to the new buying patterns.
Bare shelves, little selection, poor quality and lining up to get certain items was a feature of the Soviet States.. People wouldn’t even ask what it was for… they just got in line for whatever it was. Even if there was something they couldn’t use, like boots of the incorrect size, at very least it might be used for barter later.
Hey goofball, you’re removing the context of our cold war sanctions and 50 years of economic sabotage from NATO aligned nations when making that childish assessment. If you’ve got a bone to pick with centralized planning, go tell China that it’s not successful…or the US Military while you’re at it! Or plucky Cuba, still riding out our hostile and reactionary sanctions regime since 1958. Your notion is utterly ridiculous! Do you just like, watch Red Dawn on repeat every night, or are you just forever mentally stuck in the 1980s?
No one under 40 gives a shit about soviet scaremongering…newsflash lol. Zohran won the primary after all, and it was specifically because of what his socialist platform offers.
China was not successful until it basically abandoned communism in all but name… Mismanagement caused the worst modern famine ever in the 50’s and 60’s. They began allowing private enterprise in the late 70’s and since has become economically powerful. It was one of the poorest nations in the world before then. 80% of people lived in poverty before the 1980’s.
People are starving in Cuba – nearly 80% say they have to skip meals… Stores look the the photo above to this day.
The Soviet Union was enormous and had resources, it should have been able to easily support and feed itself, yet it remained very poor…
Sorry but nope. While some government social safety nets are good policy there are just some things it’s been shown they just don’t do well. Running grocery stores is definitely one.
The Post Office is the resounding success so keep trolling
The Post Office is not a grocery store and it was a success, for the years it was given autonomy… these days not so much.
Surely you don’t think the reason the gov can run the post office without a profit motive, but not a grocery store, is because of some innate difference between the nature of mail services vs grocery services???
Again, I point you to all the hundreds of grocery commissaries run by the federal government for our military…in bases all around the globe. A study has shown that the Defense Commissary Agency has saved these federal grocery store customers an average of $2.00 per $1.00 of tax payer dollars spent on the program. It’s also consistently rated as one of the top non-pay benefits of the military. Yes, government run grocery stores that don’t have empty shelves…gasp!!!
And the post office is less successful now because “in 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.” It was sabotaged with a lack of funding for arbitrary reasons, so it could be pointed to as an example of ‘inefficient government waste’ and then privatized by Trump’s buddy and former postmaster general Louis DeJoy.
Your abstract gesturing at the concept of ‘government is bad and meddles and always causes problems’ is just plain misguided and sad. Reagan has been dead for literally decades and you’re still hanging on…
The DCA’s are subsidized by tax payers to the tune of $1.5 billion per year to run fewer than 250 grocery stores.
What people who actually use them say..
“There really isn’t much of a difference in price with the possible exception that meat tends to be cheaper on base. The biggest cost difference comes from the fact that there’s no tax at the BX or commissary.”
“You pretty much had to do your shopping between pay days if you were smart because on paydays that commissary would look like it had been looted bare”
“Used to be a good deal now i can do better in town on most items than at the commisary.”
“It was cheaper when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, but the last time I went into a BX with my mother (who as a retiree’s wife was still entitled to shop there) it was very minimal savings – the kind og discounts level that you get with a member card at a commercial grocery. The BX side was very disappointing – the merchandise was decidedly third rate and a lot of it very outdated.”
“I was not terribly impressed so the next week, I went to a commercial store just off base. The same list was roughly $5 more off base. But I thought the service, selection and quality were worth it.”
Surely after rent control we can socialize the groceries. It’s even more of a human right to have affordable food ?!
Not under Hollingsworth unfortunately…
Please, let’s have the government provide everything. Support us in all ways from cradle to grave. I am sure choice would not be affected. State run everything and a beholden populace awaiting it’s dispensations.
Defense Commissary Agency
We will need free bread and circuses
Best Seattle can do is free fentanyl foil
Is there any organization that is advocating for municipal grocery store?
Or maybe the city should work to identify and correct the underlying issues that are driving the closure of grocery stores in the area?
Shoplifting, high taxes, utilities and wages, some of the highest fuel prices in the country (yes, that’s how groceries get to the store), and a government with an anti-business attitude… well, this is what you get. If government runs grocery stores, how would the cost dynamics be any different? Grocery stores operate on a 1% to 2% net margin. They procure in large volumes in order to get the lowest prices available. A city cannot purchase in volumes anything close to this, let alone operate the supply chain at similar costs. You would be getting Red Apple quality at bodega prices
Per the article, the New York plan is to sell groceries at wholesale prices, which would necessitate huge taxpayer subsidies, no doubt targeted at higher income people. How else to sell groceries without accounting for the costs of labor and other operations? Of course this would put privately owned groceries out of business because who can compete against a heavily subsidized competitor? I don’t see any problems at all with that plan…
Yeah neither do I! HAHA…it’s insane that your callous sarcasm is my genuine solution. Turns out the ‘right’ to a profit that we bestow upon the corporations that run our lives isn’t that well respected by the greater public when the numbers of homeless and hungry are growing nationwide…and that’s not even addressing the blatant price gouging that went on during and after the COVID pandemic.
Just like healthcare, we can offer affordable options for other necessities like food and shelter. GET OVER YOURSELF.
Groceries were cheaper on Whidbey Island
Hollingsworth is not doing anything to address the problems in Capitol Hill. It’s getting worse with every passing day. I’m not sure how any business can survive here and she is a businesswoman? They are struggling because of the criminal activities here and I’m sure that was one of the reasons why Whole Foods left. Enough of socialistic propaganda. We need a law and order here for the start.
She’s done absolutely nothing but blow hot air
No one on the council is a socialist, and there haven’t been any since Sawant. Do you actually know what socialism is or are you pretending? I think you’re pretending based on your comment lol.
She’s doing nothing period. Worse than Sawant by a country mile
The current city attorney, a super majority of the council and the mayor are all very openly “law and order” politicians. History shows, including our current national party of “law and order” that’s in power, that when you elect “law and order” politicians, you get the exact opposite.
Unfortunately the people that champion and vote for “law and order” are not very intelligent and very gullible, so it keeps happening over and over and over and…
Yes, they must be stupid if they don’t vote like me. What an enlightened take on the issues.
Do we know for sure that the Safeway at 15th and John is closing ?
Because recently when I was in there I asked not just one But 2 old middle level employees who said that they now heard th plans to teardown and remodel the store have been scrapped because the city wanted to charge them too much for the underground parking and also they were going to have to remove old gas station tanks from underground where they told me that in the 1950’s or 1960’s or so that there was a gas station where the store is now .
That doesn’t sound right as a history for that lot… Before the current building, there was still a Safeway on that lot. It was one of the old ‘Marina’ style buildings that looked like an airplane hanger. Those were built in the 50’s and 60’s. Not to mention the whole place was torn up in the late 90’s when they replaced that store and built the current monstrosity. They flipped the entire layout, putting the building along 15th and the parking behind, so I’d think that anything underneath there would have already been dug up.. I’ll do a little digging..
Look at the Fire Department tank decommissioning map, that location had fleet tank filling at one point.
The costs for digging in that location will not be cheap and the price will only continue to grow.
The best use is a parking lot, the ground will take decades to clean. The tanks were larger then what the gas station on 15th had and those were listed as being in better shape.
Similar to the udistrict one I think the plan is to demolish and rebuild with apartments above.