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NYT: Supermarket Chains Narrow Their Sights

I find this article to be humourous. It’s as if they are portraying supermarkets as altruistic to the local produce farmers.

In my opinion, the fact of the matter is that their research toward consumer attitudes hasn’t changed perceptions toward local and/or produce. The Hannaford Brothers’s research isn’t really demonstrating anything different from what anybody’s been saying for years about local produce and why farmer’s markets are always a mainstay.

Stores like Trader Joes and Whole Foods have done well, but they really haven’t been disruptive to the produce markets, as many consumers are still acting price consciously (particularly given the current economic climate).

The key to local produce lies in three key words in the article: “soaring transportation costs.”

Many of those chain stores have had to reverse the trends of globalization in the face of rising oil costs and transportation by localizing supply chains. (For example, see what Procter & Gamble has had to face with rising fuel costs:)

This means it’s all good for supermarkets, possibly iffy for the Farmers’ markets. But then, who cares? Farmers’ markets are places for local produce to be sold and if they’re getting sold in the mainstream, they don’t care. This is a by-product of the years of ridiculous farm subsidies contributing to the collapse of the Doha round.

The winners: farmers. The loser: globalization.

“It is worth remembering where the blame for this neutering of fiscal policy lies: squarely with the Bush administration. At the start of this decade, the budget stood in surplus to the tune of 2.4 per cent of GDP. On unchanged policy, this was expected to grow to a surplus of 4.5 per cent of GDP by 2008. This year’s actual deficit of 3 per cent of GDP therefore represents a worsening of more than 7 per cent of GDP, or roughly $1,000bn. Almost all of this deterioration is due to policy: to tax cuts, spending increases, and their associated debt-service costs.

That projected surplus was a priceless gift to the White House. It offered the Bush administration ample scope for outlays on homeland security and other unforeseen priorities, and moderate tax cuts as well, all within a budget balanced over the course of the business cycle. Instead, the administration knowingly opted for outrageous fiscal excess – adding insult to injury with its phoney tax-cut sunset provisions, designed for no other purpose than to disguise the long-term fiscal implications. Eight years on, this startling record of fiscal irresponsibility has all but taken fiscal policy off the table as an available response to the slowdown.

The US economy had better have luck on its side. Luck is about all it has left.”

~Clive Crook, Financial Times, August 4, 2008.

When was the last time I used twitter? I mean, I know it was the new big thing, but I don’t feel like it’s really taken off…