While there are plenty of grocery stores in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the further inside the Capital Beltway you get, the harder they are to find. That has one member of the county council wondering if the county should open its own grocery store.
While she said there’s no guarantee it would be feasible, council vice chair Krystal Oriadha said the county has to at least consider the possibility for neighborhoods that don’t have access to fresh food.
“I think that if we keep on waiting for a grocery store to come into communities, like inside of the Beltway, especially in Seat Pleasant, where I live, we’ll be waiting for a very long time,” Oriadha said. “And I feel like it’s our responsibility to figure out how to do it and do it right.”
The issue is complicated, as Oriadha said she doesn’t want to create something that turns a profit for the county, but added she doesn’t want it to cost the county, either.
At the same time, the intention is not to compete with established grocery stores in the area.
“Those grocery stores have had every opportunity to come in the communities that they’re refusing to come in. They’ve had multiple incentives talked about on the local level and passed on the state level, and they still won’t come. And so it can’t be that you get to decide not to serve our community, and the government should just sit back and do nothing about it,” she said.
If approved by the rest of the council, her resolution calls on a six month study that seeks answers to several questions that would loom over any decision to move forward with the idea.
“If we had a government owned grocery store in Prince George’s County, what would that look like? Where would it work? What management models make sense? What funding models make sense? How do we make it cost neutral?” Oriadha said.
A draft of her resolution cites stores in Oklahoma and Florida, though the one in Baldwin, Florida, ultimately closed last year because the finances couldn’t work. It was the only grocery store in town and operated for five years. A similar store in Kansas City, Missouri, is also struggling.
“It’s really important to step back and do the feasibility study first to look at what has worked, what hasn’t worked, why they’ve worked,” Oriadha said. “Are the same factors the same for here in Prince George’s County? Are there models that make sense, that are funded by the government, but operating in more of a co-op model? There’s a lot of options, and so it’s about — this could work, and finding out if it could work for us here.”
Many people, Oriadha said, are forced to shop for groceries at dollar stores, which lack fresh food options.
Oriadha said she’s hopeful state lawmakers will eventually pass a law allowing grocery stores to sell beer and wine, adding stores have told her that would work as another incentive to open in neighborhoods they otherwise ignore.
“If we target it to areas that have no grocery stores — we’re not even saying every grocery store can have it,” Oriadha said. “Let’s say it’s incentive to build a grocery store where we don’t have one. But we have big money deciding, again, that we can’t have those incentives, because if grocery stores sell beer and wine, for some reason, people think all the liquor stores will fail. I mean, that’s just not the reality.”
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