Bear with me; I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Food Lion drove off the local grocery stores before I left Liberty twenty years ago.  Since then, I’ve lived out of the Greensboro store on Lawndale and at work out of the one on Golden Gate.  For the last six years, I’ve put up with a lack of products at the latter store, which I could pick up on Lawndale, so no big deal.

Several months ago, they started a giant renovation at Golden Gate, fucking up the parking lot with dumpsters and trailers and the store by changing the location of everything.  Until then, the two stores were identical and I could hit one in a matter of minutes, getting away with what I needed.  The staff at both stores are old friends.

Fed up with the mess and unable to ever get a Diet Dr. Pepper, I swore off the Golden Gate store for Pisgah Church.  What a store.  They have an amazing array of frozen vegetables and other things I’d never seen.  BTW, I despise Harris Teeter for the privileged patrons it attracts.

So, I finally contacted Food Lion to discover their online presence was shit.  After posting my concerns, I have yet to receive confirmation by email.  I called their 800 number and it was also shit.  By this time, my ire was aroused, so I started doing some digging.

Food Lion is a $17B company domiciled in the shithole of Salisbury, on I-85 between Greensboro and Charlotte.  For a city of 33K people, they have a lot of crime.  And the there’s this:

Stores and eateries come and go bucking a high overhead caused by costly leases (some triple net), a municipal service district tax said to be the highest of its kind in North Carolina, little pedestrian and vehicular traffic, the three Ps of Downtown Salisbury: pilferage, panhandling, and lack of parking.  Uninviting South Main blight, graffiti and gang tangs, street beatings, stickups, vandalism, and rocks hurled through windows.  There’s a certain wisdom in shopkeepers closing down at night.

So, what does it say about these European assholes that they allow this kind of thing to go under their noses?  A belief was held long before neoliberalism took hold that corporations were a public trust with an obligation to the community.  Food Lion may have been started in Salisbury, but it appears it has given back little as it has been taken over by Euro carpetbaggers.  Indeed, I defy you to find a better example of corporate inequality.

We are constantly told by pols that we need to improve our communities in order to attract companies like Food Lion, but if this is how they are going to behave, what is the point?  And if they don’t give a shit about Salisbury, why should they care about Golden Gate?

Whereas:

It is one of only two cities in North Carolina to have gigabit capacity through its municipally-owned broadband system Fibrant. A press conference held September 3, 2015 at Catawba College announced Salisbury’s Fibrant system is now capable of 10 gigabit capacity town-wide; believed to be the only town owned system in the world with this capacity.

It is readily apparent that Food Lion is the greatest benefactor of this service.  They’ve driven the competition from small towns, save for WalMart which actually increases the need for public services wherever it locates.  These fuckers have their foot on our throats, capable of reducing us to anarchy in a week, should the two day supply of food in each store stop.

And you’re worried about the Russians.