Grocery Crisis in Seattle

Fight for community-controlled grocery stores

Long Nguyen

Amazon abruptly closed all their Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go physical locations nationwide on February 1st. These are grocery and convenience stores that people have relied on for cheap and available food that have suddenly gone away. There was no warning as customers showed up to these stores to find them closed.

In Washington, three Amazon Fresh stores have closed and eight Amazon Go stores have closed. Six of them are closures in Seattle. 

The employees have also suddenly found themselves without a job on no notice. Amazon has absolutely fucked over the community and its employees.

Amazon has shifted their focus to Whole Foods stores. This is because Whole Foods is a higher-end grocery chain, where they are able to jack up prices giving them their “Whole Paycheck” reputation. While a typical grocery store has profit margins of 1-3 percent, the profit margin of Whole Foods is over 30 percent.

Neighborhoods and communities should not be at the behest of these corporate behemoths and their effort to maximize profits. Human lives should come before profits. Rather than relying on more corporate grocery stores, Seattle should build community-owned and city-owned grocery stores to serve their neighborhoods. 

Amazon is not the only corporate grocer closing its locations. Fred Meyers is also closing 60 stores nationwide. These closures are devastating for working class communities.

The closure of these corporate grocery stores leaves people in food deserts. Without a reliable and close grocery store in their neighborhoods, financially strained families will have to travel longer distances, sometimes miles further, to get their groceries.

And when grocery stores close, they often stay closed. In the Central District, the closure of Amazon Fresh on 23rd & Jackson follows the closure of the Red Apple at that same location in 2017. The QFC on 15th Ave in Capitol Hill has been vacant since it closed in 2021. The Whole Foods on Madison & Broadway closed last summer. It’s still vacant. The Fred Meyer in Lake City closed last September — still vacant. The list goes on.

Seattle’s so-called socialist mayor, Democrat Katie Wilson, ran on a demand of community owned grocery stores. Katie Wilson has promised to ensure the city will have fresh and affordable food in every corner of Seattle. She has said she would work with UFCW 3000 on a “public option” for Seattle grocery stores.

So where is Katie Wilson? She has not made any moves in this direction. Instead, she is making overtures to business leaders about cutting the Amazon Tax and making further cuts to public services to fill Seattle’s budget deficit. In other words, Katie Wilson is pushing the same austerity measures that former Mayor Bruce Harrell was, as well as countless other Democrats around the country.

Working people should not have to suffer in food desserts. Seattleites should not accept being swindled by yet another Democrat in phony progressive clothing. Katie Wilson is proving that we should dump the Democrats, elect independent candidates and build a Working Class Party.