Kansas City’s failing government-funded grocery store has earned international infamy for its “empty shelves and rotten smells,” even as a leading New York mayoral candidate promises such operations there.

Despite millions of tax dollars thrown at the project since its 2018 opening in a city-owned strip mall at Linwood Boulevard and Prospect Avenue, news reports say the KC Sun Fresh grocery store “is on the verge of closure.”

Fox Business News and the Washington Post have sent reporters to see it for themselves, while London’s Daily Mail told readers, “Images at the Sun Fresh grocery store show mostly bare shelves and coolers as well as empty meat, produce and deli departments.”

“Kansas City poured millions into a grocery store. It still may close,” the Post headline reads.

“KC Sun Fresh lost $885,000 last year and now has only about 4,000 shoppers a week,” the Post reports. “That’s down from 14,000 a few years ago, according to Emmet Pierson Jr., who leads Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city. Despite a recent $750,000 cash infusion from the city, the shelves are almost bare.”

During the Post reporter’s visit, her story reads, “a single tomato is all that’s left in one section of produce at KC Sun Fresh.”

A shopper shadowed by the reporter “left the lonely [tomato] in the bin for someone else and moved on to ingredients for nachos – a Friday night treat for her and her husband. The chip aisle was bare, shelf after shelf empty. She finally found a few bags of tortilla chips nearby.”

Low demand, high crime

Kansas City’s Patrick Tuohey, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute and policy director for the Better Cities Project, told The Post the consumer demand for the store just isn’t there – and there are two other grocery stores in the area.

“Data bears out both points,” the Post story acknowledges. “A USDA analysis showed the area around the store is low income but not low access.

“And a Washington Post analysis of the adjacent Zip codes show the area has steadily lost population since 2020.”

Crime and bawdiness also plague the store and its environs, according to the Post:

“At a community meeting last year, Pierson played videos of security incidents so graphic he gave a warning in advance – a naked woman parading through the store throwing bags of chips to the ground, another person urinating in the vestibule and a couple fornicating on the lawn of the library [across the street] in broad daylight.”

A police official, the Post reports, “links the rise in crime to fallout from the pandemic, rising inflation and a shortage of police officers following racial injustice protests in 2020.”

Mayor Quinton Lucas, the Post notes, “a Democrat in his second term, said in an interview that despite KC Sun Fresh’s financial issues, ‘I still have confidence in the long-term future of a grocery facility in that area.’

“He sees two challenges: The first will be saving the current store. ‘Changing consumer behavior will be another,’ he said.”

He saw this coming

But the problems go much deeper than that – and were quite predictable, Tuohey tells The Heartlander.

In fact, Tuohey predicted them, about this very store, 10 years ago in an article headlined “Kansas City embarks on new bad idea.”

“Once again, Kansas City leaders are embarking on an expensive and ill-considered campaign using public dollars that does not address the real underlying problems,” Tuohey wrote in 2015. “When it fails, the city and its residents will be no better off than before, just poorer. And the infrastructure, crime, and education issues that really need to be addressed will be that much worse.”

Since at least the 1980s, he says, governments have gotten it into their heads that they can cause development and good economies to occur out of nowhere – and regardless of consumer demand – by subsidizing amenities such as a stadium, restaurant, hotel or bar.

“This is the mistake that cities are making, and Kansas City is one of them,” Tuohey tells The Heartlander.

“Kind of the greatest example of this is Baltimore. Baltimore has everything that a developer would want you to build downtown. They have two stadiums. They have light rail. They’ve got an impressive airport. They’ve got an inner harbor, an entertainment center, an aquarium. They’ve got everything – and yet no mayor looks at Baltimore and says ‘I want to be like them.’ Because Baltimore has not been able to solve its problems of crime or education, or its infrastructure. They’ve raced to the finish line and built all those amenities. 

“And it’s happening in Kansas City to a lesser degree and certainly in St. Louis.  

“What cities need to do is realize they are there to build that foundation, and allow private investment to come in and do everything else. 

“And not only have they forgotten that, but they’ve actually made it more difficult for that private investment to come in – through well-intended regulation, but everything from energy codes to parking mandates to zoning, to occupational licensing through decades of little tweaks that, again were well-intended.  

“We’ve made our cities uninviting for entrepreneurs, for investors.”

Can government stores even succeed?

And it’s those entrepreneurs and investors, he says – not the politicians and bureaucrats at City Hall – that know what the public wants and how to respond to even granular consumer needs with agility and efficiency.

Businesses and retail owners get that information directly from customers every day, he notes.

“We have this really rich [private-sector] marketplace that encourages providers to meet the needs of even tiny communities. But with government-run stores, we lose all that. We lose all that information we collect in the private market. 

“And so, it’s not that government-run grocery stores haven’t been successful. I would argue that government run grocery stores cannot be successful.”

What should the city do?  

“I think what the city should do is end its subsidies for this shopping center,” Tuohey says. “There is nothing keeping them there but the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ – which basically says, gosh, because I wasted money on this I have to keep wasting money on it.’”

When Mayor Quinton Lucas argues the city subsidizes such things as the Kansas City Chiefs – and that a grocery store is just another example – Tuohey responds that “unfortunately what he’s saying is ‘we do lots of dumb things. This is just one of them.’ 

“So, I would like to see the city say this was a mistake and to stop it. 

“And then I would like the city to talk to the people in that area and say ‘what are the problems? And what are the actual solutions?’”