Can America’s Supermarkets Weather the Coming Storm?

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Commentary

When I was young, my father would often say grace before dinner, thanking God for the food we were about to receive. Inevitably, he would conclude with, “And God bless the hands that prepared it.”

As a child, my parents were quick to teach me that this wasn’t just a blessing for my mother, who stereotypically prepared all our family meals. Instead, they would point out that “the hands that prepared it” meant everyone from the farmer, to the farmhand, to the butcher, to the truck driver hauling the product to market, to the grocery store workers, and everyone in between.

Since I grew up in a fertile farm area of black muck land, “farmhands” to us usually meant documented seasonal workers from Mexico—laborers who came north annually to harvest crops such as onions, celery, Boston and iceberg lettuce, carrots, and spinach.

Not only was I learning to pray for the diverse people who came together to create my meal, but I was also learning the basics of entrepreneurial capitalism.

I was reminded of these nostalgic memories after watching Charlie Kirk’s similar breakdown of the free market in his recent video, “If You Think Food Is Expensive Now, Just Wait.” His subsequent video makes the case that food lines could come to America.

Kirk begins by explaining that a ban on “price gouging” in the United States would require going after farmers, distributors, and trucking companies. “When there are price controls, producers ... produce less because they make less money, and there will be supply shortages—and then prices will really go up,” he said.

Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, then introduces a new generation to the Nobel award-winning economist Milton Friedman, with the video clip “I, Pencil,” taken from Friedman’s 1980 PBS television show “Free to Choose.” The segment was in turn inspired by author Leonard Read’s 1958 essay “I, Pencil.”The clip outlines the complex process that creates a “simple pencil”—from sourcing raw materials including wood, graphite, and metal, to the assembly and distribution that happens before it eventually ends up in someone’s hand.

Kirk then expounds on free market capitalism in his next video, saying, “We have it so good in the United States of America that we don’t even teach our kids [that] a grocery store is a modern miracle.”

We can, however, thank the pandemic lockdowns for the fact that people were briefly forced to appreciate their local stores in a way they never had before. The learning process came as folks searched for toilet paper, hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies, and various food items, often being told by store associates that “the truck had not come in yet.” Worse yet, people were often told that coveted items “were not on the truck” and there was no assurance they’d be on the next truck. That’s how truck drivers came to be regarded as heroes of the lockdown.

So while there were undoubtedly various reasons for shortages during the lockdowns, it at least became clear to a large segment of the population that a lot had to happen behind the scenes before items would magically reappear on store shelves.

And that was a good thing, because we are currently living in a time when the majority of people are both apathetic and clueless as to where their food and dry goods come from. For instance, shoppers may look for organic blueberries without realizing the product they’re buying was shipped nearly 4,000 miles from Peru to the United States—the country that ironically leads the world in blueberry production. Meanwhile, there’s been a clarion call for goods “made in the USA,” but the fact remains that only about 11 percent of American-bought goods are manufactured here, compared to 80 percent 40 years ago.

In years past, before the birth of the modern supermarket (commonly attributed to Piggly Wiggly in 1916), the origin of store goods was well known, promoted, and discussed.

A trip to Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts takes you back in time to an original store as it looked in 1838. The Asa Knight store was “an imposing two-and-a-half-story emporium” where customers would pay for items using credit earned by selling Knight their own eggs, butter, cheese, and homemade crafts and clothes. Knight would, in turn, sell those items in the cities where he bought the goods to stock his shelves.

(While the Asa Knight store is no longer in operation, it’s probably the closest you’ll get to recreating a visit to Oleson’s Mercantile from “Little House on the Prairie” or Ike Godsey’s store from “The Waltons.”)

And while some might credit modern globalization with the abundance and variety of U.S. groceries in recent times, the influence of a global market can just as easily be seen in Asa Knight’s 1838 emporium. Old Sturbridge Village teaches visitors that New England stores carried cotton textiles from England, France, and India, linens from Central Europe, and silks from Italy and China. They could also purchase “teas, coffees, spices, sugar, raisins, and dyestuff from China, Arabia, Greece, the East and West Indies, and South America.”

Early American newspaper ads, as well as storekeepers themselves, often hyped foreign imported goods, reflecting the early-American fascination with items from abroad. It was as much about showcasing the romantic allure of overseas goods, which were highly coveted at the time, as it was about making the sale.

Of course we’ve done a complete turnabout in 2024, with items tagged “made in the USA” being a draw for discriminating consumers shopping for everything from denim jeans to jewelry.

Indisputably, the choices given to American consumers have grown exponentially since Knight’s little store opened its doors. The Cato Institute tells us that “between 1975 and 2022, for example, the number of products in an average U.S. supermarket has increased by more than three-fold, from 8,948 products to a whopping 31,530.”

However, an NPR discussion with Benjamin Lorr, author of “The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket,” highlights changes to the American grocery store that reflect a shift away from Friedman’s libertarian “pencil” economics toward something more sinister.

During the discussion, Lorr highlights “concerns about the insatiability of American appetites and how the markets can be a force for good and bad.”

The fact is that in a struggling economy, particularly an economy as bad as the one we’re in now, “price” is our No. 1 priority when choosing our food. That fact alone “can have deleterious effects on laborers like farmhands or fishermen” because, as Lorr tells us, “labor is the place where the industry can extract ‘efficiencies.’”

For instance, Lorr says we now see truckers laboring to create twice the output while collecting 40 percent less in wages, which is why some of them call their jobs “sharecropping on wheels.”

It’s also an unprecedentedly uphill battle for entrepreneurs who want shelf space in the local supermarket as they compete with much bigger players “or those with easy access to venture capital.”

Lorr’s book highlights the problems of “a supply chain that has grown enormous and complex from serving the needs of a supermarket,” and urges people, whenever possible, to buy “local, direct from the farm” instead.

The “miracle of the modern grocery store,” which Kirk talks about, still exists at its core, but like so many other inventions of entrepreneurial capitalism, it’s being destroyed by opposing philosophies. In a country whose population is growing against its will—and whose economy is being torn asunder by socialist policies and unchecked globalism—the once unspoiled ideas that birthed the modern grocery store have become sullied and sinister.

Our supermarkets survived the lockdowns, but can they weather the coming storm? Perhaps now more than ever we need to ask God’s blessing on the people who get the food to our tables.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.