I love Schnucks, but I can’t agree with this:

Robert Buchanan, assistant professor of finance at St. Louis University, gives the Schnucks credit for trying something bold and innovative — and for not jacking up the prices at the downtown store.

As for the businesses who are struggling as a result, that’s a fact of competitive life, he said.

“Retail is very much a Darwinian struggle, and the best operators are going to win,” Buchanan said.

The competition for lunch customers in downtown St. Louis isn’t simply a matter of the best food establishment winning out. Schnucks received state and federal “incentives” and tax increment financing from the city–subsidies that allow it to keep prices low and put smaller eateries out of business.

The story of the Schnucks Culinaria in St. Louis illustrates how government efforts to subsidize grocery stores can effect neighborhoods. Small stores and diners are hurt. The people who gain the most are the office workers who get access to cheap, convenient salads and sandwiches. But it’s not like those salaried employees wouldn’t have been able to eat any other way. They could have packed lunches from home just as cheaply if they had cared to take the trouble.

We should keep in mind the unintended consequences of grocery store subsidies the next time activists like Michelle Obama call for eradicating food deserts. To politicians, any place without a fancy deli that suburbanites would find attractive is a food desert–and all the small cafeterias that are already there had better get out of the way.