by NickC25 | 2026-01-08 14:22:26+00:00
>The concept of a "food desert" is wild to me. I routinely walk 3km each way to get groceries and think nothing of it. One of the best ways to make sure I get exercise.

I too do the same. However, I, like you, live in a major metropolitan area filled with millions of people. Walking, or biking a few K or miles to the grocery store isn't unheard of.

>Do American Wal-Mart locations in small towns charge higher prices than ones in major cities in the same state?

To my knowledge, that's also illegal here. The thing is though, food deserts aren't due to proximity to a large city, they are more due to location economics. No offense meant when I say you're thinking about this the wrong way - let's break it down.

Here's the scenario: you're a food importer, bringing in food to Canada. You have 1000 kilos of, let's say, strawberries.

Because import costs are high, you want to make sure all those 1000 kilos sell, and sell quickly because it's fresh produce and it will spoil pretty quickly. You could likely just bring all of them to the GTA, and they'd all sell, because the GTA is nearly 7 million people so there's plenty of demand (and money).

If you really were concerned about sales and proximity concentration, you could extend the GTA area to the entire golden horseshoe, which is roughly 11 million people, all within a few hours drive to the heart of the GTA. Cool, right? You could quickly sell all those strawberries.

Except now you're ignoring Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton, etc. So you have to spread those 1000 kilos around to major metro areas, because that's where demand is.
But what are you ignoring here? The very rural parts of the country, because it's harder and more expensive to transport goods there, and there's not as much money because there's little to no economy in extremely rural areas - so certainty of sell-through is not as guaranteed as it is in major cities. I'm talking Nunavut, the northern islands, Yukon territory, etc. It's also extremely hard to model demand from those areas.

So even if you said, ok, I'll send 1 kilo to 1 rural area. Well, you're going to run into trouble because you're not going to have the demand, nor does the locale have any money so even if there was demand (and the economy strong enough for people to be able to spend on your berries), you have to make less money because you're spending more money to transport produce, and as you say - it's illegal to charge different prices depending on location.

So, in a very tight margin business like produce importing, what will you do? You'll ignore the most rural areas, because it's just too risky. And so will your competition, and as well, adjacent business that import other types of foodstuffs that have the same constraints you do.

And BOOM, food deserts are created.

In the USA, there's plenty of people whose closest grocer is an hour away. And because that grocer is in a pretty remote location, there's not many distributors who are willing and able to risk high-cost produce going to that grocer, because there's no economy to justify a higher cost product. So you get nothing but processed junk at those stores, because it doesn't go bad, it doesn't spoil, and can sit on the shelf for months.