Grocery Retail & Food Apartheid in Rochester, NY

A case study of the transitioning nature of the food retail marketplace and the resulting inequities in food access

Earl Pearson

Introduction

If the spring of 2020 has taught us anything, one of the large takeaways should be the essential nature of grocery stores and their workers. However essential they are to the public at large, though, the current food system is constrained by the limits of capitalism, and therefore does not distribute access equitably. While wealthy, predominantly White neighborhoods might have an abundance of options, those in lower-income or Black neighborhoods might struggle to get the things they need. While a form of essential public infrastructure, grocery stores are (with very few exceptions) provided entirely by the public sector, and are thus subject to the whims of capitalism without mandate to provide services evenly across the population.

Figure 1: Wegmans store on West Main Street, Rochester, 1937. This form-factor is typical of grocery stores of the era, which were normally located in a neighborhood business district.

Over the last century, the nature of how Americans access their food has changed. Historically, people would go to a central marketplace to buy their provisions, and over time that means of food access evolved toward neighborhood grocery stores. For a time, each neighborhood had one or more small groceries in their local business district, proving the surrounding community with the foodstuffs they needed. However, as cities changed and transportation technology advanced, these small neighborhood groceries gave way to larger supermarkets that offered amenities like larger selections and more abundant parking for the automobiles that had become widespread.

Figure 2: Wegmans store at 1910 Monroe Avenue, Brighton, 1949. This was the first suburban Wegmans location to open. It later moved to nearby Pittsford.

Gradually, as Americans with the means began to relocate to more suburban locales, the supermarkets followed them into the urban fringes. This shift will be the focus of this analysis. Using Rochester, New York as a case study, I will explore the ways in which the food retail marketplace has changed over the years from roughly 1925 to the present, and study the impacts that have emerged, especially on those populations living in the city proper using a historical lens. Based on spatial data of grocery store locations compiled from city directories in roughly five-year intervals, it will take an overall look at how the distribution of stores has shifted from heavy concentration in the urban core to being predominantly scattered throughout the suburbs. Then, it will look at Wegmans specifically, as it is currently the largest chain in the area, is a Rochester institution with roots dating back to 1916, and is a cultural icon locally.

Figure 3: This Wegmans location in Irondequoit (1960) was indicative of the shift toward expansive locations in suburban strip malls rather than on a neighborhood main street.

As groceries transitioned to supermarkets, they consolidated not only in number (chains would replace multiple small neighborhood stores with one larger store), but in number of operators, and it is not uncommon today for a city’s food retail marketplace to be dominated by only a handful of large companies. In Rochester, the landscape is currently dominated by Wegmans, Tops, and Aldi. Walmart is also a large force in the local grocery market, but since their business model is more oriented towards selling everything rather than focused on groceries specifically, they are not included in this analysis.

When these chains began to focus primarily on the suburban clientele rather than that of the city, they left behind large swathes of the urban core, in which residents (especially those without a car) struggle to access healthy food. These have been called “food deserts”, though there is debate about how best to classify them. For the purposes of this study, we will focus instead on the concept of “food apartheid”, which scholars and activists have turned to rather than “food desert” to describe the systemic nature of the problem more accurately. As Joshua Sbicca describes, “the term ‘food desert’ has emerged as a term to describe a condition, which often leads food activists to lend charitable support to manage the symptoms of the condition, whereas a term such as ‘food apartheid’ lends itself to an analysis of the structural causes behind the condition” (2012). In other words, while food deserts have the air of being a naturally occurring phenomenon, food apartheid is a socially and politically constructed system. This examination will use the business practices of Wegmans as an example of how a company can, unintentionally or not, contribute to creating a system of food apartheid.

Literature Review

Joyner et. al. (2022) discuss the concept of supermarket redlining, in which “food retailers intentionally pulled stores out of low-income inner-city neighborhoods, setting the stage for geographically based, racialized food access issues.” This echoes the concept of residential redlining, in which the Homeowners Loan Corporation designated rated cities’ viability for financial investment by neighborhood. Those neighborhoods deemed “hazardous”, or a “D” grade, were outlined in red and starved of financial capital. These areas frequently were deemed such because of the presence of African American communities or populations of non-White, ethnic “other” groups. These tended to also be the neighborhoods that lost their supermarkets, and the trend holds true today. In fact, the only remaining Wegmans store in the City of Rochester is in the only section that received the highest grade, “A”, in the 1930s, which will be discussed later in this piece.

Eisenhauser (2001) notes that “[a]lthough by 1984 store openings exceeded closings nationally, through the 1980s cities experienced a net loss of supermarkets.” She goes on to note that this is attributed to problems operating stores in disinvested urban areas, including higher costs for land, labor, and utilities, lower profit margins, and higher rates of theft, leading the industry to focus more on suburban areas where these costs are lower and customers are wealthier, allowing higher profits.

Figure 4: Wegmans in East Rochester, 2019. This store was 20-25,000 square feet when it originally opened in 1958 and is one of the oldest and smallest stores (~52,000 square feet) still in operation today.

Eisenhauser also notes the increase in the size of stores that took place as they transitioned from neighborhood groceries to supermarkets: “the suburban land parcels allowed the chain to build ever bigger stores, and by the 1950s, newly constructed stores had grown from 10-15,000 square feet to 20-25,000 square feet…between 1950 and 1960, supermarkets share of the retail food market jumped from 35% to 70%” (127). Later, she notes that “new stores…are commonly as large as 50,000 square feet”, as of the time the article was published in 2001 (128). Wegmans stores in 2022 are generally upwards of 100,000 square feet, sometimes significantly so.

Regarding the systemic nature of how this came to be, Karen Washington, the food activist who coined the term “food apartheid”, prefers it over “food desert” because it “looks at the whole food system, along with race, geography, faith, and economics…you get to root cause of…the problems around the food system”, stemming from the decades of systemic disinvestment in communities of color in American cities (Brones 2018). To address the issue, there must be a further dismantling of the structures that enabled and created it. Rather than just attracting a new grocery store to a neighborhood without one, investment in the people and communities is what is needed to fully address the systemic nature of the problem.

Empirical Analysis

Data Sources

To conduct the analysis of how much things have shifted over time in Rochester specifically, I used a historical dataset of grocery store locations in the Rochester area from 1924-25 to 2005 from  Groceteria.com . Groceteria is a hobby site dedicated to exploring the history of supermarkets in the United States and Canada, operated by David Gwynn, an associate professor and librarian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The data is compiled from city directories and other historical records. To this data, I added the stores that currently exist in the area as of spring 2022, using the local chains’ online store directories.

Data Analysis

Using ArcGIS Pro software, I plotted the store locations spatially and generated a series of maps showing the distribution of stores in roughly five-year increments from 1924-25 to 2005, plus 2022. These maps are shown in interactive form below.

As the nature of the food retail market changed, the distribution of stores across the Rochester area did too. In Figure 23 below, use the slider to examine how stark the difference is between 1924-25 (left) and 2022 (right).

Figure 23: Then vs. now: the difference in distribution of grocery stores in the Rochester area between 1924-25 (left) and 2022 (right).

Findings and Discussion

In the mid-1920s, 189 stores were heavily concentrated in Rochester’s city center, operated by five companies: A&P, Flickinger, Hart’s, Mohican, and Uncle Sam’s. At this time, Wegmans would have been only a single store (and would not yet be called “Wegmans”), so is not included in the available data, which focuses on chains.

By 1945, the number of stores in the city had shrunk to 170, while 26 stores had opened in suburban areas of Monroe County (Figure 9). City stores became somewhat more dispersed, and more chains emerged to serve the area.

Figure 24: The first suburban Wegmans location on Monroe Avenue in Brighton, 1949. This location would move to Pittsford in 1965.

Around this time, as Eisenhauer noted, grocery stores began to transition toward the supermarket model (larger stores, with wider selections, as well as integrated meat, bakery, produce, & dairy sections, etc.), and their growth in the newly built, White, middle class suburbs was significant (2001). In Rochester, one example of this is the shift from Hart’s groceries to Star Supermarkets. The number of Hart’s stores peaked in 1939-40 at 124, at which point they began to consolidate and were replaced by larger Star stores which expanded into the suburbs. By 1965, 28 Star stores operated in the area, and only 12 Hart’s remained.

Figure 25: Pittsford store on opening day, 1965. This store moved from a business district on Monroe Avenue in Brighton to a new shopping plaza nearby. It would expand from its original 26,000 square feet to 60,000 square feet in 1974.

By this time, suburbanization was in full swing, and the shift in the distribution of stores is striking (Figure 13). Between 1945 and 1965, the overall number of stores in the county shrunk from 196 to 113, with an almost-even split between the city and suburbs (61 city stores, 52 suburban). Between 1965 and 1970, the balance shifted, and in 1970 there were 64 suburban stores and 46 in the city. By 1965, Star and Wegmans emerged as the two largest chains with 28 and 16 stores, respectively, and fought for dominance into the 1980s. By the mid-1980s, Wegmans had emerged as the dominant force in the local market, defeating Star in a coupon war that rendered the latter insolvent (Morrell 2014). At this time, 58 stores remained in the county (42 suburban, 16 urban; Figure 17).

Figure 26: Pittsford "superstore", 2011. This store was expanded to a whopping 134,000 square feet in 1997 and is considered the company's flagship location.

In the 1990s, Wegmans began to reevaluate its business strategies, opting to focus mainly on the “superstore” concept piloted at its Pittsford location. At this time, it continued to increase the size of its suburban stores dramatically, while it began to divest itself of most of its remaining city locations, which tended to be much smaller (Table 1). Between 1995 and 2007, 80% of the stores in the city closed. The company cited the stores’ unprofitability as the reason for closure. In 1995, when the company announced that they were closing the Midtown Plaza and Bay/Culver stores, a reporter from the local newspaper obtained a copy of the Midtown store’s financials. He reported that while the store was still making money, it was not as wildly profitable as the vastly larger suburban superstores (Craig 1995). These closures signaled a shift in philosophy for the company; the older and smaller Mt. Hope store closed in 2003 (despite announcing unrealized expansion plans in 1997 and 2002), followed by the Driving Park store in 2007. These stores were situated not directly in areas given the worst grades (and thus “redlined”) on HOLC maps in the 1930s, however, they did serve adjacent communities that were.

Table 1: Size of select Wegmans stores in the Rochester area over time. Locations in the City of Rochester are shaded in gray.

Figure 27: Wegmans locations as of 2022 (orange) overlaid on a Rochester-area HOLC "redlining" map from the 1930s. The only remaining store within the city limits is in the sole area that received the highest grade. Wegmans stores closed since the mid-1990s are shown in red. Other stores are shown in white.

The only store remaining in the City of Rochester as of 2022 is the one on East Avenue, one of the wealthiest parts of the city. Notably, it is situated in the only area of the city that was given the highest grade of A (“Best”) on a HOLC map (Figure 27, above). This store was completely rebuilt and more than doubled in size in 2013 (Figure 28, below). Everywhere else in the city received a lower grade and many neighborhoods were starved of capital investment as a result. Today, of the 8 stores that remain in the city, Wegmans only exists in the wealthiest portion. Tops operates two supermarkets, while the other 5 stores are limited-selection, low-cost retailers: Aldi, PriceRite, and Save-A-Lot.

Figure 28: The only remaining Wegmans in Rochester proper: East Avenue. This store was completely rebuilt and expanded in 2013, more than doubling in size. Use the slider to see the difference between the old store and the new one as seen from Google Street View (2012, left; 2022, right).

By choosing to close its stores in lower-income neighborhoods and limit its urban investment to just the wealthiest enclave, Wegmans has contributed to the degradation of the urban food system and the development of food apartheid. While the company stated that the stores were unprofitable and the larger suburban locations would “better serve the community”, many of those living in the City of Rochester have trouble accessing far-flung suburban developments. While the Driving Park store has reopened as a PriceRite location, preserving food access for its surrounding community, which is predominantly Black and Hispanic, the Mt. Hope store was demolished and redeveloped into a retail corridor surrounding the University of Rochester. This location served both students and employees of the university and adjacent hospital complex, as well as residents of the predominantly Black 19th Ward neighborhood to the west. These residents do not necessarily have easy access to other stores, especially if they lack a car. Of the 26 regularly scheduled bus routes in the city, 2 run within at least a block or two of a grocery store, with many providing direct access (and several serving multiple stores). The 19th Ward, however, is home to three of those routes that do not, leaving those residents (especially in the southern part of the neighborhood, which used to be near the Mt. Hope Wegmans) with difficult journeys to access the food they need.

Despite these closures happening 15+ years ago, food access concerns have been raised in recent years by local activists, aimed at Wegmans in particular. In March of 2021, activists protesting the death of Daniel Prude, an unarmed Black man brutally murdered in the street by Rochester police targeted the Wegmans location on East Avenue, citing their disinvestment in the city, reliance on local police for store security, and demanding that they recommit to serving the City of Rochester and provide nutritious food directly to the public, rather than having them rely on nonprofits and charities for fresh food (Bell 2021).

As of the 2020 Census, the racial composition of the city is 38% Black, 33% White, and 20% Hispanic, compared to 6% Black, 80% White, and 6% Hispanic for the other 20 towns in Monroe County and 15% Black, 55% White, and 20% Hispanic for New York State overall. The median household income for city residents is $37,395, vs. an average of $77,258 for the rest of the county and $71,117 statewide.

The grievances raised by protestors are especially egregious when one examines the stark divides and segregation that exist between the City of Rochester and its suburbs. A 2020 EdBuild study examining segregation between bordering high- and low-poverty school districts found that the border between the Rochester City School District (which is coterminous with the city boundaries) and the neighboring Penfield Central School District was the most segregating boundary in the United States. In Rochester, 47% of children are living in poverty, whereas only 5% of Penfield children do. This wasn’t the only local border to make the list, however: of the eight districts that share borders with Rochester, five—boundaries with the Penfield, Brighton, West Irondequoit, Rush-Henrietta, and Gates-Chili Central School Districts—ranked within the top 50 nationwide (EdBuild 2020). While not explicitly about food access, this serves as one indicator of the huge disparities between those who live in the City of Rochester and those who live in the rest of Monroe County.

Figure 29: The Rochester City School District and the eight districts that border it. The boundaries between RCSD and five of its neighbors rank among the top 50 most segregating school district lines nationwide (red, dashed). The line between Rochester and Penfield ranks #1. RCSD boundaries not within the top 50 are in white.

Recommendations

The extremely stark divide that exists between the poverty of the city and the wealth of the suburbs stems from the region’s extreme legacy of racial and economic segregation, along with systematic disinvestment from communities of color in the urban core.

In terms of policy prescriptions or planning tools to remedy the food access problem, I think the issue really goes beyond anything addressable on the scale of “attract grocery operators to open new stores in disinvested neighborhoods” or “increase public transit access to existing stores in the suburbs” or even “the city/local nonprofits working on this issue should open their own stores”, as has been done in some rural communities.

The problem here is decades of segregation and systematic disinvestment, triggered by centuries of racism. That is what needs to be addressed here; the food access problem is only a symptom of the larger disease. As has been alluded to in various sections of this paper, the problem extends beyond the location of supermarkets. The problem is segregated school systems, where suburban kids have opportunity and city kids do not. The problem is racist systems of policing, by which unarmed Black men having mental health crises are fatally assaulted by officers in the street. The problem is employers locating away from public transit and being inaccessible to city residents without cars. The problem is systems of power that disregard Black voices, and poor voices, and female voices, and queer voices. And on and on and on.

While the system of food apartheid that exists in the Rochester area is significant, it must be addressed as part of a larger dismantling of systems of oppression and structural racism, otherwise any attempts to remedy it will fail.

Bibliography

Figure 1: Wegmans store on West Main Street, Rochester, 1937. This form-factor is typical of grocery stores of the era, which were normally located in a neighborhood business district.

Figure 2: Wegmans store at 1910 Monroe Avenue, Brighton, 1949. This was the first suburban Wegmans location to open. It later moved to nearby Pittsford.

Figure 3: This Wegmans location in Irondequoit (1960) was indicative of the shift toward expansive locations in suburban strip malls rather than on a neighborhood main street.

Figure 4: Wegmans in East Rochester, 2019. This store was 20-25,000 square feet when it originally opened in 1958 and is one of the oldest and smallest stores (~52,000 square feet) still in operation today.

Figure 24: The first suburban Wegmans location on Monroe Avenue in Brighton, 1949. This location would move to Pittsford in 1965.

Figure 25: Pittsford store on opening day, 1965. This store moved from a business district on Monroe Avenue in Brighton to a new shopping plaza nearby. It would expand from its original 26,000 square feet to 60,000 square feet in 1974.

Figure 26: Pittsford "superstore", 2011. This store was expanded to a whopping 134,000 square feet in 1997 and is considered the company's flagship location.

Figure 28: The only remaining Wegmans in Rochester proper: East Avenue. This store was completely rebuilt and expanded in 2013, more than doubling in size. Use the slider to see the difference between the old store and the new one as seen from Google Street View (2012, left; 2022, right).