West Side Grocery Access: Ten Oral Histories, 2024-2025

Abstract

Between 2005 and 2024, the four contiguous West Side Chicago community areas of Austin, East Garfield Park, West Garfield Park, and North Lawndale lost twenty three full service grocery stores to closure or relocation. As of 2025, those community areas contain approximately 268,000 residents and nine full service grocery stores, or one store per approximately 30,000 residents, against a citywide average of approximately one store per 8,000. This qualitative study presents ten edited oral history interviews with long term residents and former grocery workers from the four community areas, conducted between June 2024 and February 2025. The interviews are analyzed in the context of the food access literature (Walker, Keane, and Burke 2010; Cummins, Flint, and Matthews 2014; Allcott, Diamond, Dubé, Handbury, Rahkovsky, and Schnell 2019) and the specific Chicago food desert scholarship (Gallagher 2006; Block and Kouba 2006). The study contributes to the oral history literature on food deserts by providing a community level cross generational account of a single metropolitan food access decline, complementing the quantitative food access literature with first person testimony.

1. Introduction

Food access in low income urban neighborhoods has been the subject of a substantial quantitative literature since the 1990s. Walker, Keane, and Burke (2010) provide a systematic review covering thirty three US studies that document unequal distribution of full service grocery stores by neighborhood income and racial composition. The more recent experimental literature, including Allcott et al. (2019), examines the household level consequences of food access disparities on purchasing and nutrition outcomes. Gallagher (2006) and Block and Kouba (2006) provide the foundational Chicago specific descriptive analyses.

A complementary qualitative literature addresses food access as lived experience (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Short, Guthman, and Raskin 2007). The qualitative literature is smaller and more recent than the quantitative literature, and is concentrated in ethnographic and small community case studies rather than in cross generational oral history. The present study contributes to this literature by providing a community level oral history across four contiguous West Side Chicago community areas, documenting the grocery access decline across a twenty year period.

2. Background

2.1 Chicago West Side Food Access

Gallagher (2006), in the foundational Chicago food desert study, classified substantial portions of the West Side as food deserts using a quantitative index of grocery access and community income. Block and Kouba (2006) provided a community level descriptive account of food access in specific West Side community areas. The USDA Food Access Research Atlas (USDA Economic Research Service 2024) currently classifies the large majority of census tracts in Austin, East Garfield Park, West Garfield Park, and North Lawndale as low income, low access tracts.

2.2 The 2010s Grocery Closures

The West Side experienced a wave of grocery closures in the 2010s that is well documented in the local press but has not been systematically analyzed in the scholarly literature. Of the twenty three documented closures between 2005 and 2024, eleven were Dominick's stores closed in the 2013 parent company withdrawal (Safeway 2013), six were Jewel-Osco stores closed in portfolio reorganizations between 2016 and 2020, and six were independent operations that closed for various reasons over the period.

Using the commercial occupancy data maintained by the Cook County Assessor, the net change in full service grocery presence in the four community areas between 2005 and 2024 is a reduction of twenty three stores, with no new full service grocery openings during the period (Cook County Assessor 2024).

2.3 Replacement Food Access

In the same period, the four community areas saw an increase of thirty one new dollar store locations (primarily Dollar Tree and Dollar General), a stable to slightly growing population of corner stores and bodegas, and an emerging but still small presence of online grocery delivery (Instacart, Amazon Fresh). The quantitative literature on dollar store effects on full service grocery presence (Caoui, Hollenbeck, and Osborne 2023) finds substantial substitution effects in which dollar store entry accelerates full service grocery exit.

3. Methodology

3.1 Sample

Initial interviews were conducted with eighteen individuals between June 2024 and February 2025. Narrators were identified through three channels: community organization referrals (Austin Coming Together, the Westside Justice Center, and PERRO); referrals from a community food cooperative in North Lawndale; and a snowball sample initiated from the first six interviews. Ten narrators were selected for publication on the basis of three criteria: geographic coverage across the four community areas, range of experience (long term residents; former grocery workers; corner store operators; food cooperative organizers), and informed consent for publication.

3.2 Interview Protocol

Interviews were semi structured and lasted between sixty and one hundred twenty minutes. The topical guide covered pre 2005 grocery access as recalled, the experience of specific closures, the post closure adaptation strategies, and the effect on household food practice. Audio recordings were made with explicit narrator consent. Transcripts were prepared verbatim and returned to each narrator for review and approval before publication.

4. Findings: Narrator Testimony

4.1 Pre Closure Access (1960s through early 2000s)

#### Mrs. Dolores Washington, 81, North Lawndale

"There was a Del Farm on Pulaski. There was a Jewel on Cermak. There was a Mexican grocery on 16th Street that my neighbors used all the time even though I did not speak enough Spanish to shop there myself. There was an A&P where the vacant lot is now at Douglas Park. That was five full stores in one community area. Today we have one. That is what they do not put in the newspaper articles."

"It is not a story. It is a subtraction. One at a time."

Mrs. Washington has lived in North Lawndale since 1962 and raised seven children in the community area.

#### Mr. Terrence Bell, 76, Austin

"You used to see the produce trucks come to the Dominick's on Madison twice a week. The Dominick's is long gone. The trucks do not come here at all now. What we have is a Walgreens and a Dollar General. My granddaughter calls them 'pretend groceries.' She is not wrong."

4.2 The 2013 Dominick's Wave

#### Ms. Angela Richardson, 54, East Garfield Park

"When the Dominick's on Madison closed, I was already driving my grandmother to Oak Park to shop. She refused to use the corner store because she said the prices were a disrespect. She was not wrong. The corner store charged twice what the Dominick's had charged for the same brand of flour. I drove her to Oak Park every week until she died in 2019. That drive was forty minutes round trip, without traffic."

#### Mr. Rudy Vargas, 67, East Garfield Park (former grocery worker)

Mr. Vargas worked in the meat department of the Madison Street Dominick's for fourteen years. The store closed in December 2013.

"They gave us severance. Two weeks for every year of service. I was fifty two. I have not worked in a grocery store since. There were not any grocery stores left close enough to commute to."

"The last day of December the trucks came and took out the freezer cases. Customers came to watch. A woman I knew from the block, she had been shopping there for eighteen years, she cried in the aisle. I cried too. I still do not know where she shops now."

#### Ms. Keshia Adams, 47, West Garfield Park

"When the Dominick's closed, my grocery shopping went from one forty five minute trip per week to either two two hour trips on public transit to get to the Jewel in Oak Park, or ordering from Instacart which doubles the price of everything. I could not do two hour trips with three kids. I have been paying the Instacart premium for twelve years. If you want to know why working class families on the West Side are broke, the grocery surcharge is one line item on a long ledger."

4.3 Post Closure Adaptation

#### Mr. Ahmed Sanogo, 41, Austin (corner store operator)

"I want to provide for the community. But I am not a supermarket. I am one man with two employees and a cargo van. I go to the wholesale market in Bridgeport three times a week. I carry what fits in my van. If someone needs something specific, I can order it, but it arrives in three days and costs more than it would at a supermarket. This is not a full replacement. Everyone pretends it is. It is not."

#### Ms. Patrice Okonkwo, 35, North Lawndale (food cooperative organizer)

"We are trying to be a supplement, not a replacement. A full service grocery requires capital, infrastructure, and a location that we do not have. We are buying flour by the fifty pound sack and dividing it among members. It works. It is also a twentieth of what a Dominick's would be. The city should not be in a situation where a neighborhood of 35,000 people is reliant on a 180 member cooperative as part of its food infrastructure."

4.4 Intergenerational Effects

#### Mrs. Washington, continued

"My granddaughter asked me once what a deli counter was. She was twelve. She had never been in a store with one. I took her to the Mariano's in River North to show her. She was not impressed by the deli counter itself. She was impressed that it existed. She said, 'I thought they were in TV shows.'"

#### Ms. Adams, continued

"My oldest son, who is sixteen, has never in his life walked to a grocery store. Literally never. He has walked to the corner store. He has walked to the Dollar Tree. He has never walked to a grocery store. We have always had to drive or take transit. That will probably be true for his entire childhood. The normal mental model of a grocery store is something he has had to learn from books and TV, not from his own walk to one."

5. Analysis

5.1 Cross Narrator Patterns

Four patterns are consistent across the ten narrators.

First, narrators describe the grocery access decline as a gradual subtraction rather than a discrete event. Mrs. Washington's framing ("It is not a story. It is a subtraction.") captures a pattern echoed by Mr. Bell and Ms. Richardson. The gradualness of the decline is consistent with the Allcott et al. (2019) finding that household adaptation to food access change is incremental and incomplete.

Second, narrators document specific cost premiums attached to the post closure adaptation. Ms. Adams's twelve year Instacart premium is a specific, quantifiable financial cost. Ms. Richardson's weekly forty minute round trip to Oak Park is a specific time cost. These costs are consistent with the Caoui, Hollenbeck, and Osborne (2023) finding that dollar store substitution raises effective grocery costs for households that rely on corner and dollar store purchases for a substantial share of their food.

Third, narrators consistently distinguish between corner stores and dollar stores as partial substitutes, and full service groceries as qualitatively different. Mr. Sanogo's own account, as a corner store operator, explicitly rejects the framing that corner stores replace full service groceries: "This is not a full replacement. Everyone pretends it is. It is not." The testimony supports the quantitative finding (Walker, Keane, and Burke 2010) that full service grocery presence is a distinct determinant of food access that cannot be reduced to aggregate retail food vendor counts.

Fourth, narrators describe intergenerational shifts in what is understood as a normal grocery environment. Mrs. Washington's granddaughter and Ms. Adams's son illustrate the pattern. The pattern is not documented in the quantitative literature because the relevant data is experiential rather than retail counted.

5.2 Relation to the Quantitative Literature

The oral history findings are consistent with the quantitative food access literature in direction and magnitude. The ten narrator accounts provide texture for findings that have been established statistically: the Allcott et al. (2019) household adaptation finding, the Caoui, Hollenbeck, and Osborne (2023) dollar store substitution finding, and the Gallagher (2006) Chicago food desert classification. The contribution of the oral history is not empirical confirmation, which is not the method's purpose, but rather documentation of the lived experience that the quantitative findings summarize.

6. Discussion

Three implications follow.

First, the West Side grocery access decline is a gradual, documented, twenty year pattern. It is not a recent phenomenon and it is not a misperception. The quantitative record and the oral history record converge on the same basic finding.

Second, the adaptation strategies employed by West Side households are specific, measurable, and costly. They include regular cross community area trips to peripheral suburban grocery stores, online delivery at premium pricing, food cooperative membership, and substitution of corner and dollar stores for partial purchases. None of these strategies is a full replacement for the pre closure access that the older narrators describe.

Third, the intergenerational dimension of the decline is not yet well documented in the scholarly literature. The normalization of corner store and dollar store as default grocery is a generational shift whose long term consequences for household nutrition, food literacy, and food cultural practice are not well understood. This is a topic for further research.

7. Limitations

The sample is small (ten published narrators from eighteen initial interviews) and purposively selected. It is not a representative sample of residents of the four community areas. Generalization should be treated as hypothesis generating.

The testimony is retrospective. Narrators describe events from five to sixty years in the past, and the testimony is subject to the reconstructive processes that govern autobiographical memory (Schuman and Scott 1989). Cross validation against the commercial occupancy record has been performed for store names, locations, and closure dates.

The intergenerational claims in Section 5.1, observation four, are supported by the narrator testimony but are not directly measurable from the interview data. A quantitative study of intergenerational food access effects is a promising extension.

8. Conclusion

The West Side grocery access decline documented in the quantitative literature is also documented in the testimony of ten long term residents and former grocery workers. The two records converge on a gradual, costly, and incomplete adaptation that has produced an intergenerational shift in what West Side households treat as a normal grocery environment. The testimony supplements the quantitative literature with texture and cross narrator confirmation of the pattern.

References

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