Tragedy reminds us that grocery stores are more than retailers
In northern Stark County, there's squabbling over the possibility of one community having too many grocery stores.
Competing retailers and developers have expressed concern that building a new Meijer's Supercenter on the site of the former Kmart in North Canton will oversaturate the current market.
Earlier this month, a new Meijer opened in Jackson Township, just a few miles west of North Canton. Meijer also plans to open a new supercenter in Alliance as an anchor of the Carnation Mall Redevelopment Project.
Too many grocery stores?
People in Canton could only wish for such a problem.
When it comes to trendy restaurants and grocery stores, the county seat has been stepped over and around.
Swaths of the city are in food deserts — that is, people must travel more than a mile to purchase fresh food. One nonprofit, StarkFresh, is trying to alleviate some of the problem with a "Food Justice Campus" located downtown, and with plans for a second, full-service store in the southeast quadrant.
Salt-bomb menus
You can draw a direct line from the outsourcing of middle class jobs to statistics which show that a third of Cantonians live in poverty. Long gone are the days when factory jobs here were not only plentiful, but they paid more than enough to support a plethora of retailers in town.
Neighborhood mom-and-pop stores, which once offered fresh vegetables and meat, have gone the way of the rotary phone, replaced in many neighborhoods by Godzilla-sized, all-purpose retailers, fast-food joints with salt-bomb menus, and corporatized "dollar" stores, which may or may not offer fresh fare.
Grocery stores are one of the components needed for a healthy neighborhood. The others are recreation, education and public services such as post offices and libraries, and easy access to highways.
It must be noted that 70% of Cantonians are not in poverty, and even needy people still must buy food. Not having enough options or a convenient place from which to buy quality groceries is the equivalent of being told that you and your city aren't worth the risk.
Gathering places
For 20 years, the residents of Buffalo's Masten Park neighborhood fought to have a single grocery store.
Tops Friendly Market — which once operated in Canton — opened one there in 2003.
In the days following last week's horrific mass shooting by a white supremacist inside the grocery store, survivors have shared how Tops has served as an anchor and symbol of stability in the neighborhood.
For as long as we've been a country, grocery stores have served as gathering places, where the lives of the people in the community intersected. Former President Bill Clinton said he learned about Black life through the customers who patronized his grandfather's general store in Hope, Arkansas, noting that James Eldridge Cassidy was that rare white storekeeper in the Jim Crow south who treated his Black customers with dignity.
People in Buffalo's Masten Park neighborhood shopped at Tops or had friends and family who did. Now, even that island of connection and stability has been attacked by someone who doesn't even know them.
The terrorist, who lived hundreds of miles away, hunted down and killed 10 innocent people for the singular "crime" of being Black. He not only killed those who were of no threat to him or his community — they'd probably never even heard of it — he wrecked and ruined the one place they could count on.
No matter how much remodeling, cleaning and updating is done to that store, nothing will assuage or scour away the memories, pain and anger in a community which has lost so much.
Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Charita Goshay: Grocery stores serve as a community's gathering place
