Again, these places aren’t being closed. They are being sold to a different grocery giant. The issue at hand is monopoly and price fixing, not fewer grocery stores.

Did you read the article you posted about Santa Rosa? That law was pushed into place so one guy could open a Smart & Final. There was already a Lola’s (independently owned grocery store), Target with grocery section and a Costco there. How is that a food desert?

He also didn’t like that the law had the appearance of being written specifically to help one property owner get a new tenant. Commercial real estate broker Tom Laugero, who was working to get Smart & Final into the Santa Rosa Town Center space, petitioned the council to pass the law. […] “We corrupted our process,” Wysocky said. “We took 12-year-old statistics from the federal government and molded our process just to help this one tenant out. And that’s not OK.”