Heartland - Grocery's Shelf Life

What a Saturday grocery run taught me about one of the most consequential design problems in America

This past Saturday I went grocery shopping.

That's not a very dramatic opening sentence, I know… but stay with me.

I live on Kansas City's East Side, in a neighborhood I have genuinely grown to love, but also a part of the city that qualifies as a food desert. Our closest grocery store (that isn't a Family Dollar or a gas station) is a Whole Foods about a mile and a half away, just west of Troost.

Most people would hear that and think: "is this dude really complaining about a ten minute drive?" Fair.

But this past week, my car was in the shop (what started as a routine oil change became a three-day, $1,500 visit to the mechanic, as they tend to do) and that ten minute drive suddenly became either a $25 Uber, a long walk with limited carrying capacity, or a bus ride that would still leave me hiking the last half mile.

If this were New York, fine. But between my neighborhood's barely contiguous sidewalks, a couple gnarly hills, and let's be honest, a little hard-earned laziness after a long week, the nearest affordable grocery store starts to feel a lot further away than the map suggests.

Having spent my 20s broke in Seattle, putting myself through design school on a barista's wage, "Whole Paycheck" was off the table. Even now I rarely think to go there, despite my obsession with their hot bar.

Instead, I opted for the Sun Fresh a half mile further east. I hadn't visited in a while, having recently given over to the convenience of curbside pickup from a Hy-Vee on my way home from the office. That kind of workaround has a way of letting us stop noticing things we probably should be noticing.

When I walked in on Saturday, though… I noticed.

The shelves were sparse in a way that felt less like "restock is coming Tuesday" and more like a store quietly negotiating with itself about what it could still afford to be. It's a pattern playing out not only in Kansas City, but throughout the Heartland… and well beyond.

What's more, I'd just come from our monthly Neighborhood Association meeting, where we were introduced to a program DecarcerateKC is spearheading that will build a network of mutual aid pantries in our neighborhood and others like it. Later on in the meeting, another neighbor asked for volunteers for a program helping young parents build skills around healthy eating, meal planning, budgeting, and navigating the grocery store itself.

(That last one is worth sitting with.)

I came home feeling two things at once: genuinely troubled by the scale of the problems that face us, and genuinely energized by the spirit of the people working to solve them.

It led me to sit here writing our monthly newsletter and wondering: how might we, as designers, show up more fully? How might we make an impact that doesn't only benefit our clients' bottom lines, but also improves quality of life for the communities they serve?

And that, I believe, is exactly the right headspace for our program this month.

On the afternoon of March 26th, we will be sitting down with Mimi Yacobucci, RDI a member of RDI's Southwest + Pacific Chapter, for a conversation around some of these very topics.

Mimi spent years working on the inside of one of the most influential grocery brands in the country — the one I never think to go to — before going independent. Today, she consults brands on what better grocery design can actually look like in practice, and she's been developing her own body of work on this question that is, frankly, the kind of thinking the industry needs more of.

I believe more now than ever that grocery stores are one of the most consequential design problems in America today. Not because of what they could be — though the possibilities, as Mimi has shown me, are genuinely exciting — but because of what it costs a community when they disappear.

To be clear: none of this is a design problem, at least not in the sense that we typically talk about retail design. Redlining, disinvestment, and the structural forces that created and sustain food apartheid in the wealthiest country on earth are byproducts of policy decisions and economic systems that were never going to be fixed by a sexier produce section or a more experiential grocery environment — no matter how much I wish it were that simple.

But design does live inside those systems, whether we're paying attention or not. And as designers, we have choices to make about what we notice, what we push for, whose experience we're actually centering when we sit down to work, and how we might create value that goes beyond the financial, for everyone a brand touches.

I believe designers have more to contribute to these conversations than we usually give ourselves credit for, even if we're clear-eyed about the limits of what design alone can do.

This month's conversation will be the first in a series of quarterly virtual sessions we're calling Retail Talks — a place where we examine the forces shaping the world our clients operate in (and we, as human beings, live and shop in), and explore what that means for the creative work we do. These are the conversations that don't typically make the cut for project kickoffs or client presentations. And because the questions we're asking are bigger than any one region, they're exactly the kind that benefit from the diverse perspectives of RDI members across our whole Institute.

In that spirit, if something here sparked a thought, a reaction, or a new line of thinking, I'd genuinely love to hear your take. That's what I'm a member of RDI for — to form deeper connections with this community, and to pull on some of retail's loose threads together... and see where it takes us.

That's just kinda how my overstimulated ADHD designer brain works these days.

Drop a comment, reach out, or find me at the next in-person event. And mark your calendars for the 26th.

See you soon,

Michael

President, RDI Heartland Chapter