DEAR EDITOR:
I find Connie Rogers’ letter to the editor, published last
Friday, interesting in the extreme.
DEAR EDITOR:
I find Connie Rogers’ letter to the editor, published last Friday, interesting in the extreme. A dissection of some of her rhetoric with logic reveals so many flaws as to make her conclusions comical.
Ms. Rogers asserts that “A full-service grocery store requires about 3,000 residents to support it. With the addition of Costco last spring, our current grocery stores have already lost business.”
By my count, with the addition of Costco early this year, which is arguably not a grocery store but rather a store that sells groceries (and in much larger quantities than most families use), and then including Safeway, Nob Hill, and PW Market, the sum is four. Obviously, by Ms. Rogers’ math, Gilroy, with a population hovering around the 46,000 mark, has an obvious need for 11 more grocery stores. Please tell us what other stores you might have in mind to fill this glaring grocery gap, Ms. Rogers. A Whole Foods, perhaps, which many residents have been clamoring for? Whoops! Non-union! Not bloody likely.
And let’s keep in mind that grocery clerks in union stores are not all that well-paid. As a matter of fact, many union supermarket employees earn less than $10 per hour, and on the average, earn $312 per week. In addition to the above wage figures, even if Wal-Mart opened every one of the 40 Superstores they are proposing in California, they would only capture about 1 percent of the market share in the state.
I am sure that the thoughtful reader will wish to check my facts in the above paragraph. To that end, those with Internet access may do so by logging onto http://ufcw770.org/strikefacts.pdf (you’ll need Adobe Acrobat to view the page).
The source is a United Food and Commercial Workers Union website, so I have great faith that Ms. Rogers, although never a union employee but a long-time official in the South County Democratic Party, assigns it extreme credibility. By the way, UFCW is the same organization (the locals are different) that seems to be joined at the hip with Gilroy First!
Perhaps candidate Dion Bracco was right when, during the recent CMAP/Dispatch debates, he said “Wal-Mart has become a whipping boy in this race … Other businesses just have to learn how to compete.”
Robert T. Dillon, Gilroy
Submitted Saturday, Oct. 25 to ed****@****ic.com
