An open letter to VP Harris, former President Trump and every politician talking about food prices

Yesterday I was visiting one of the IGA retailers in rural Georgia. It’s a third-generation family business, serving their small community today the way their grandfather did almost a hundred years ago – great service, friendly staff, fresh produce and meat, fair prices. If the store closed tomorrow there wouldn’t be another source of fresh food for a 50-mile radius.

Running a family-owned store (IGA has over 2,100 of them in the U.S. today, serving rural, suburban, and urban shoppers in almost every state) means competing against the biggest companies in the world, like Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, Target, Dollar General, even Amazon. Now they are facing the European retailers like Aldi, Trader Joes, and Lidl. It's always been a hard job with long hours, working holidays, managing high volumes on very low margins.

Every day the costs of running your store go up, the availability of labor goes down, and there are more and more companies trying to take a piece of your business.

When everything goes right, family-owned grocers operate on razor thin margins — 2% or less. Lately nothing is going right. You often lose money on commodity items like bread, milk, and eggs, and frequently the costs of energy, transportation, and labor grow so fast, you realize you worked 80-hour weeks only to lose money at the end of a month.

Inflation has made a hard job even more difficult. Everyone is angry about the price of food, and they often take out their frustrations on the stock team, cashiers and department managers who work throughout our stores.

To Vice President Harris and former President Trump, I have one simple request: when looking for a scapegoat on why grocery prices are high, temper your statements with the facts. One third of the U.S. grocery industry is made up of independent retailers, all fighting to ensure they can provide food to their communities. Pre-COVID, post-COVID, our fight is the same, and so is our bottom line: less than two cents on every dollar. Maybe. On a good day.

Last year, independent grocers' net profits shrunk to 1.4%. Which means unlike big corporate retailers, global corporations, and credit card companies, we have lost leverage during inflation. Said another way, family-owned small businesses are not gouging shoppers.

If you are looking for villains in a high inflation market, I suggest you look elsewhere. Global companies would be a great start. Or look at the credit card providers: Visa’s net profit last year was over 50%, they might be a good start.

Independent grocery stores didn’t pump trillions of dollars into the economy, and we didn’t create hyperinflation; we didn’t start land wars in Europe or the Middle East; and we didn't raise the price of energy, labor, utilities, or anything else we pay for to keep our stores operating.

Our store teams were considered heroes during COVID. While others sheltered at home, we worked to keep our communities fed. I submit our owners are heroes still — fighting inflation, trying to keep costs low, while hoping to make enough pennies to keep the stores going.

Trying to lower the cost of groceries is a noble goal. We support you; we would work with you. But blaming family-owned grocers for high prices is just plain wrong.