I saw a post on LinkedIn this morning that hit hard: Safeway is closing 12 more stores across Colorado, Nebraska, and New Mexico. The official line? “Evaluating performance.” The poster called it what it is: “the long tail of being looted.”
He’s right. In 1986, KKR turned a community-grounded grocery chain into a debt vehicle through leveraged buyout. Union jobs that supported families and paid mortgages became quarterly obligations to distant investors. What was once neighborhood infrastructure became extraction machinery.
But here’s the part this story hints at that nobody wants to say out loud: private equity didn’t break the supermarket model. They just accelerated the collapse of infrastructure that was already failing communities it was never designed to serve.
The Supermarket Was Always Propaganda, Not Infrastructure
The American supermarket wasn’t invented to feed communities efficiently. It was designed to win the Cold War.
Listen to the Freakonomics episode on how supermarkets helped America win the Cold War, and you’ll hear the story nobody talks about anymore: supermarkets were created to showcase American abundance against Soviet scarcity. Those massive stores full of infinite choice? That was the point. We built food retail infrastructure optimized for impressing foreign dignitaries, not for serving marginalized communities or creating resilient local food systems.
When Boris Yeltsin visited a Texas supermarket in 1989, he reportedly told his advisors that if Russians saw this abundance, there would be a revolution. Mission accomplished – the Soviet system collapsed shortly after.
But what works as propaganda doesn’t necessarily work as community infrastructure.
When They Defended the Store, Then Closed It Anyway
I was at USC during the LA riots in 1992. The governor sent National Guard troops to defend the 30th Street Market – the community grocery store that served the neighborhood. That’s how essential these stores are: worth deploying military force to protect during civil unrest.
Fourteen years later, USC closed that same store to build more student housing. Created a food desert in the community they’d deployed troops to protect. The store was essential during crisis, disposable during normal operations.
That’s not irony. That’s the supermarket model showing its true nature: it only works when serving affluent demographics or achieving impossible volume. The moment the business case changes, the infrastructure disappears regardless of community need.
We Spend 1% of GDP Managing the Model’s Waste
Here’s the economic absurdity nobody wants to calculate: America spends roughly 1% of annual GDP on food banking. Not to feed people more efficiently. To avoid burying even more edible food than the 40% we already waste.
We built a food system so fundamentally broken that we need a parallel charity infrastructure processing billions of dollars annually just to manage the excess the primary system generates while communities go hungry.
That’s not a distribution problem. That’s a design failure.
The supermarket model requires massive volume, national distribution optimization, limited SKU selection that fits centralized logistics, and profit margins that only work in affluent areas. Everything else becomes “waste” that food banks try to rescue after the system has already failed.
The Model Cannot Survive Where Communities Need It Most
Safeway isn’t closing stores in wealthy suburbs. They’re closing in the margins – rural communities, lower-income urban neighborhoods, anywhere the 40,000 square foot format with national distribution requirements can’t hit volume targets that justify the overhead.
This isn’t new. Supermarkets have always abandoned communities that don’t fit the model. We just politely call these areas “food deserts” instead of “places where propaganda infrastructure doesn’t make business sense.”
Private equity accelerated this abandonment by adding debt service obligations on top of already fragile economics. But the fundamental problem existed long before KKR showed up: we built food retail infrastructure optimized for showcasing abundance to Soviet officials, not for serving actual community needs at sustainable scale.
What Actually Works in the Spaces They Abandon
Picture the neighborhood where Safeway just closed. 40,000 square feet sitting empty because corporate headquarters can’t make the numbers work.
Now picture a 1,500 square foot community-owned space in a repurposed restaurant down the street. Commercial kitchen still functional, retail area right-sized for neighborhood scale, ownership structure that doesn’t answer to shareholders demanding quarterly growth.
That space can do things Safeway never could:
Specialize so deeply corporate players can’t compete. When you’re processing rescued food into culturally appropriate ready-to-eat meals, you’re creating products that don’t exist in conventional distribution. When you carry that Ethiopian teff flour from the regional mill because your backend warehouse coordinates direct supplier relationships, Safeway literally cannot match that – it’s not worth their shelf space for products that won’t move nationally.
Operate viably in communities corporations abandon. Lower overhead, community ownership, rescued food integration, and value-added processing make these stores work exactly where the supermarket model fails. The “food deserts” that Safeway creates by closing become prime territory for infrastructure serving community needs rather than shareholder returns.
Turn waste streams into revenue streams. While supermarkets generate 40% food waste that becomes disposal costs, regional processing facilities with commercial kitchens and blast chillers transform that waste into manufactured product lines. Hot sauces from surplus peppers. Cream sauces and powders from rescued dairy. Chocolate confections from ingredients that didn’t sell. Prepped vegetables and meal kits from produce that’s perfect but not pretty enough for retail.
This isn’t charity food rescue. This is waste-to-value manufacturing that solves multiple municipal headaches simultaneously: disposal costs become processing revenue, organic waste that creates methane problems in landfills becomes agricultural resources, and food access challenges get addressed through local production rather than charity dependency.
Build permanent community assets. When private equity closes the Safeway, decades of community shopping dollars leave as capital extraction. When a community owns the Node, the wealth stays local. The infrastructure remains community-controlled regardless of corporate strategy shifts.
The Regional Processing Model That Solves Multiple Problems
The infrastructure behind neighborhood stores addresses challenges municipal planners struggle with daily: waste disposal costs, methane mitigation in landfills, food access in underserved areas, and economic development opportunities.
Regional processing facilities don’t just coordinate food distribution – they manufacture value from waste streams. Today’s rescued peppers become tomorrow’s signature hot sauce line. Surplus dairy transforms into cream sauce bases and cheese powders. Chocolate confections emerge from ingredients that couldn’t move through conventional retail. The prepped vegetable and meal kit production creates local jobs while addressing food access challenges.
This coordination operates at municipal and metro scale, turning organic waste-to-value into systematic operations. The blast chiller capacity that preserves rescued food also enables product development that generates revenue rather than disposal costs. The commercial kitchen infrastructure that creates meal kits also processes the organic waste that would otherwise create methane problems in landfills – those spontaneous fires that waste management directors lose sleep over.
Municipal waste partnerships create multiple benefits: disposal costs decrease, processing generates revenue, landfill methane issues reduce, local jobs increase, and food access improves in areas where corporate retail won’t operate. One vendor relationship addresses multiple budget line items and compliance requirements simultaneously.
What Replaces Safeway When Private Equity Leaves?
The poster is right that Safeway’s closures represent 40 years of looting. Private equity extracted everything that could be extracted from community infrastructure that was already fragile.
But here’s the opportunity for municipal planners: we shouldn’t be waiting for another corporate chain to maybe serve these communities. We should be building infrastructure that solves multiple problems simultaneously.
Not another 40,000 square foot corporate format that only works in affluent demographics.
Not nonprofit charity models that manage waste without reducing it.
Regional processing facilities that turn disposal costs into manufacturing revenue. Waste-to-value systems that reduce landfill methane while creating local jobs. Manufacturing operations producing hot sauces, cream bases, chocolate confections, meal kits, and powders from rescued food streams. Neighborhood-scale retail in spaces too small for corporate players, serving communities they abandon.
One vendor relationship addresses multiple municipal challenges: waste management costs decrease, landfill problems reduce, food access improves in underserved areas, local employment increases, and community-owned assets build permanent value rather than depending on corporate strategy decisions.
When Safeway closes, municipal planners face a choice: wait for another corporate chain that might eventually leave, or partner with infrastructure designed to solve the problems that made corporate retail unsustainable in the first place.
The processing capacity exists. The waste streams exist. The underserved communities exist.
What’s opening now is the path to connect them in ways that create value instead of costs.
Join the Movement
Communities across the country are building food infrastructure designed for resilience rather than propaganda. Regional coordination enables neighborhood-scale stores to operate viably where corporate supermarkets fail, while creating circular economy systems that eliminate waste instead of generating it.
Ready to build food sovereignty in your community? Learn more about the Nexus and Node model and connect with the Fellowship of Living Systems movement at livingsys.org
The revolution isn’t coming – it’s being built, one community-owned store at a time.