Good of you to point this out, but I think this is just "the way it is" and has been for years.
Below is what has me concerned.
PREDATORY PRACTICES...
bother me way more.
I've always been fortunate to not live in a "bad" area. About 30 years ago, when I was fortunate enough to (figuratively) move "up the hill" a little, the nearest grocery stores were a bit on the expensive side.
The newest & nicest of those had amazing quality deli & made-for-you products. In fact, that had Chinese take out that was probably in the top 10 of all Asian food in town.
The Real Story
One day, I was across town visiting someone who lived in the (literally) poorest part of Reno.
I stopped into a grocery store owned by that same company simply because I was driving by and I knew the brand.
Imagine my shock when I discovered the highest prices I'd ever seen in a grocery store!
I walked through the produce section to find shockingly high prices, yet the quality was really quite dismal.
So shocked by this, I walked through the entire store.
In the meat department, there were no good cuts of meat. No rib steaks or filet mignon too be found. None.
Instead, I found what was visibly cheap quality meats, but AT PRICES APPROACHING THE PRICE I'd pay for a good rib steak on the other side of town!
From canned goods to paper products, it was all the same: items priced as much as TRIPLE what they would have been on my side of town.
I walked out of that store appalled at what I had seen.
And I knew exactly what that was: This was a neighborhood where there wasn't much to choose from and
the company was exploiting the people!
I imagines that many people in this neighborhood road a bus to get to work.
A large number of people walk to & from that grocery store.
Thus, most people had no easy, practical choice.
This store was pretty much the only game in town.
Now, I've never thought of corporate America as having much of a heart.
But the 30 minutes I spent wandering around that store destroyed any belief I had that corporate greed wasn't the norm.
