‘Shame on Aldi’: Store closure rekindles concerns over food deserts

Andy Brandt has lived in East Garfield Park for 15 years. He and his wife, Amy, have two children — a son and a daughter. And like every family, they have their favorite grocery store: Aldi.

The Brandts had two in their neighborhood: one at Chicago and Kedzie avenues and one on Madison Street, both just about a mile from their home.

“My wife and I joke because we call the one on Madison my Aldi and the other one on Kedzie was her Aldi,” said Brandt.

But as he and his daughter approached that store one day last month, he noticed the sign had been removed and no other cars were in the lot. A week later, Brandt learned “his” Aldi, at 3835 W. Madison, had closed for good.

While Brandt said even though “it’s not a big deal” for his family to shop at the other location, other residents might not be able to switch so easily — which is concerning to him in an area that lacks enough healthy food options, a persistent problem on the South and West sides.

An Aldi spokesperson told the Sun-Times it was a “difficult decision” to close the store.

“We take the closing of this location very seriously. Our decision was based on several factors, including consistently declining sales and the fact that we’ve operated this location at a loss for several years,” the statement continued. “Poor sales performance and increased expenses have simply made it unsustainable to keep the store open.

“We have been proud to serve the residents of the West Garfield Park neighborhood over the past 30 years, and we thank our customers for their loyalty.”

The spokesperson also noted the Aldi at Kedzie and Chicago is “just over one mile” from the one that closed.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

But community leaders said Aldi’s decision exacerbates their concern about “food deserts” — areas where residents lack access to many items sold at full-service grocers, especially fresh produce.

The Food Empowerment Project estimates more than 500,000 Chicagoans, a majority of them Black, live in food deserts. Another 400,000 live in neighborhoods with plenty of fast-food restaurants — but no grocery stores nearby.

Aldi was one of only two supermarkets in the West Garfield Park neighborhood — the other is a Save-A-Lot at 420 S. Pulaski Rd. Convenience stores in the area offer some food but lack fresh produce.

West Side United, Rush University Medical Center’s Health Equity office and the Garfield Park Rite To Wellness Collaborative gathered outside Aldi offices at California and Granville in late October to protest the closing. “Shame on Aldi” read one sign at the protest.

The decision to close the store is “the latest example of corporate/community malfeasance that seems to intentionally harm a neighborhood whose residents are fighting for survival,” T.J. Crawford, executive director of Garfield Park Rite to Wellness, said in a statement.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Activists hand out free food on Saturdays

The organizers want Aldi to meet with community leaders and the city to discuss the closure and, if Aldi won’t reopen, they want to buy the building for $1 and open their own fresh produce provider at the site. Over the weekend Rite to Wellness handed out fresh produce in the building’s parking lot. The group plans to continue the “emergency food distributions” outside the closed Aldi on Saturdays through Dec. 18 (except Nov. 27).

“Access to food should not be a privilege,” said Julia Bassett, manager of Health and Community Benefit for Rush. “If I have access to Pete’s Fresh Market or Mariano’s or Whole Foods, so should everyone else, including those in this community.”

Many of the Rush employees and medical students at the rally have seen firsthand how lacking access to healthy food affects their patients.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

“If they have heart disease, for example, part of [their] treatment is healthy eating,” said medical student Marissa Pharos. “It’s cutting back on sodium, it’s cutting back on that fast food. You can’t do that if you cannot find a grocery store that provides healthy food. So this doesn’t just impact the community as far as finding food, it impacts their health long term.”

But some saw the supermarket’s closing as inevitable.

WVON Black Excellence Hour radio host P. Ray said she used to shop at the store at least once a week, but said the parking lot outside sometimes felt unsafe.

“It’s not feasible for a corporation to function in a space like that,” Ray said.

For Brandt, beyond Aldi leaving, companies that refuse to consider the community as a place to do business in the first place is a major concern.

“Something needs to be done on the political or community level,” Brandt said. “And by the same token, I wonder: is Aldi the one really responsible? Is the one chain that actually was in the neighborhood, but has since left, more responsible for the problem than any of the number of chains that have just never come to the neighborhood at all? I don’t know that I fault Aldi for that, but it certainly is a problem.”

Cheyanne M. Daniels is a staff reporter for the Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.

Cheyanne M. Daniels/Sun-Times