“Supermarket Socialism”

In late October, the Erie City Council unanimously approved a plan for their government to buy Stub’s Market, the town’s only full-service grocery store. Erie, pop. 1,100, is in Neosho County, roughly 20 miles southeast of Chanute, or15 miles north of Parsons in Labette County. For the people who live in and near Erie, Stub’s was an amenity that improved their lives, the difference between full-service shopping at home or heading north to buy in Chanute or south, in Parsons.

The store’s owners, David “Stub” Mahurin and his wife, Shirlene, had tried to sell the store last year but could find no buyers. The covid pandemic arrived and accelerated, and rumors started that the store would be shuttered and the town left to the rural dispositions of a food desert.

“A grocery store is an essential thing for a city. And people think if we don’t have the store, then the town’s going to really die,” Erie City Councilman Jason Thompson told KOAM-TV, of Pittsburg. ” It will affect property rates, the sales tax, etcetera, etcetera. It’s like losing a school, they say.”

Over the months, the notion of a city-owned grocery store as, say, a public utility, began to take hold at the Erie City Hall. A committee was formed to craft a plan, massage the finer details, see how it could happen. By September, formal negotiations were underway, contracts were being drafted, and the City announced that it intended to buy the store.

The Council’s formal vote, 5-0, was on October 26. According to The Parson’s Sun, the City will pay the Mahurins $300,000 for the store, and roughly $100,000 for the value of inventory at the time of the change in ownership, set for Jan.1. In addition, for the next ten years the City is to pay the Mahurins five percent of the store’s annual gross sales, an amount estimated at between $60,000 and $70,000, based on yearly sales in 2018 and 2019.

Nothing has been said, publicly, but it appears that if store employees are working for the city, and the store’s inventory is government inventory, and 95 percent of sales go to the city, Erie is soon to embrace a form of supermarket socialism. A government-owned grocery store, essential to advancing life in a community, may be new to rural Kansas but it has roots in the old central planning apparatus of the Soviet Union. The exception here is that prices are not commanded by the government; they are framed in the crosscurrents of supply demand, and the gyrations of producers and wholesalers.

Supermarkets would be new to the form, but elements of socialism in local government have been around for a long time.

For one example, many local governments offer socialized golf. In Lindsborg, the course is owned and operated by the city. Government golf is popular in other towns, an alternative to the expense and exclusivity of country clubs; Wichita, Topeka, Hutchinson, and Salina are among the larger cities with municipal golf courses.

The old, hysterical cries about “socialism” may gain currency on a campaign brochure or at a politician’s pep rally but in reality, we have already embraced large parts of its progressive doctrine. Elements of socialism can be found in our government-operated police and fire departments, and in hospital emergency rooms; service or treatment are available regardless of the ability to pay. The fibers of socialism are woven into the base of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and, even, farm subsidies, price supports and bailouts.

Agriculture, which provides both an inventory and a customer base for the grocery business, would dry up and blow away in Kansas without the government aid that started generations ago in the dust bowl years. Example: the latest covid-provoked farm aid package, announced on Sept. 17, is $14 billion, which brings this year’s special, additional, federal payments to American farmers to a record $51.2 billion. Forty percent of farmers’ net cash income this year will come from the government.

Supermarket socialism should come as a complete surprise in Kansas. Elements of socialism have been alive and kicking in our government, top to bottom, and a part of our lives, for a long time. We are healthier and safer, and our communities are more livable because of it.
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