> Do you have any data that suggests that people are simply choosing unhealthy options vs healthy ones?

Who do you think has more data regarding consumer behavior: you, me, or Dollar General?

If you, me, and Dollar General were to try to predict the purchasing habits of 100 store customers, who would win?

I don't have this data. Dollar General does. If Dollar General's data said something else, Dollar General's shelves would carry something else.

>No ones saying Dollar General’s business model is to ensure people only get access to unhealthy options. This is an absurd straw man that no one is claiming.

You are correct, that is an absurd distortion of my argument. My argument is that Dollar General wants to give its customers what its customers want to buy. If Dollar General's customers wanted healthy food, Dollar General would give it to them.

Look, when I used to drive between cities on a nil budget, I would eat sardines and unsalted nuts at gas stations. I would walk up and down aisles full of brightly colored candy and crackers and find the little shelf in the corner with a tin of sardines. True story.

You know why that shelf is in the corner and the candy is front and center? Because most customers will buy the candy. If people were walking in to the gas station every day and buying them out of sardines, they'd have to branch out into other healthy foods. If people kept buying those they'd diversify more. Eventually the candy might disappear.

Guess what? This will not happen. Consumers aren't going to choose healthy food when modern engineered food products are singing sirens' lullabies on the next aisle. Not unless you change the consumers.

>Can you provide any examples of food deserts that once had great selections of produce and non-processed foods, which disappeared because people weren’t choosing to shop there due to “too healthy” of a selection?

All of them! Processed food is a modern invention. Every neighborhood has had to have some kind of food, as long as it has had people. Before the 50s it was a foregone conclusion that they sold relatively unprocessed foods. Those were the only ones! At some point between then and now, the balance shifted, and the real food was pushed aside. You can nitpick this by specifying neighborhoods that haven't gotten much denser since the '50s, but there are still plenty of those in food deserts.

Every neighborhood market that exists evolved over time and became what it is today by responding to the needs of its customers. Markets don't close because people don't buy a product. They just stop selling that product.

Look, this is not a defense of "the free market". This is about common sense. Just look around you. Look at what people are eating. Look at the options available to them. Look at how they choose from those options.

This isn't even an argument against regulation. I am in favor of regulation. I am also in favor of regulations that make sense! You have to regulate food products, not food stores!

Limit the sizes of snack food bags. Tax sugary drinks. Put warning labels on products that have been optimized with behavioral psychology. But for God's sake, do not simply regulate the size of stores and order them to stock lettuce! All that will get you is rotten lettuce.