The grocery landscape in southern Dallas is facing a drastic shift as two Save A Lot stores, pivotal in serving a high-need community, shutter their doors for good. The stores located near Fair Park and on Lancaster Road have ceased operations, leaving a Fiesta Mart as the solitary option for residents in need of fresh produce. Local community members, like Timothy Griffin who was caught off-guard by the sudden closure, expressed their concern regarding the dwindling grocery options. "They got a church on every corner, but nobody put anything back in the neighborhood," Griffin told FOX 4 News.
The closures mark an increase in food insecurity for an area that, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, already battles with the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food. Southern Dallas, classified as a 'food desert', now faces additional strain on nonprofit organizations and city resources, as the loss of these stores forces residents to travel further for affordable groceries, or forgo fresh options altogether. Dallas city leaders have sought to attract new business to the area with little success, and as customer Jackie Crawford noted to FOX 4 News, "Because it’s a poor area, and people don’t want to put a Tom Thumb or Kroger in this area."
The sweep of closures follows a restructuring by Save A Lot’s parent company, Moran Foods LLC, which has been selling off most of its company-owned stores since 2020 in favor of a wholesale model. The two Save A Lot stores on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and South Lancaster Road were acquired by Yellow Banana near the end of 2021 to provide affordable fresh food to these under-served neighborhoods. The South Lancaster Road store posted overt closing signs with discounts on remaining food items, signaling a clear end of their tenure in the community. Despite the impact, Yellow Banana has remained silent, not responding to requests for comment as reported by The Dallas Morning News.
In the face of these closures, residents are scrambling for alternatives. Rosemary Garcia, a resident, explained her predicament as she prepared to switch her shopping to Fiesta Mart, "It might not be far, but when you have your groceries and are walking, you need to stop and rest. The 15 minutes can end up being like 25 or 30,” she shared with The Dallas Morning News. More than one-third of Dallas residents live in areas meeting the 'food desert' criteria, dealing with the difficulty of accessing affordable or good-quality fresh food, a statistic not lost on the residents facing this new reality.
Critics of the closures are using the term 'food apartheid' to describe the deliberate segregation impacting access to nutritious food, a result of what they argue is systemic injustice. "I don’t call it a food desert. I call it a food apartheid because it’s purposely done. People are not putting the grocery store there for people to have access to it," Tammy Johnson, founder and executive director of Empowering the Masses, a local nonprofit organization, said in The Dallas Morning News. In a measure to offset these closures, Kroger has not pursued building a store in South Dallas but has instead launched a delivery service to a local community center, offering it without a delivery fee. This move, however, is seen by many as a mere patch on a growing issue in food access among Southern Dallas communities.
