I Kept the Chair So You Can Keep the Price.

Essie is the body I declined to seat at register 3 in the discount grocery I own outside Pikeville, Kentucky. She’s 54. Her feet have been swelling since the spring. She keeps her purse on the floor because the stool she could have set it on is not there. The warehouse flyer in the spring of 2021 offered the seat for $25 — chrome post, black plastic, the kind a Walgreens cashier sits on. I declined the flyer across all 14 stores. The stool is in the back room, in the bin, where the warehouse flyer told me it would sit if I declined it — alongside the four stools from the closed Piggly Wiggly, which had the misfortune to close before I could refuse to buy them. I declined it. That 2.9-tenths of a cent is hers. You carry it home in a plastic bag.

The seven Save a Lot stores operated by Yellow Banana on Chicago’s South and West Sides closed their doors on July 25, after $13,500,000 in TIF financing to reopen them and a 26% year-over-year drop in SNAP/EBT redemptions when the federal benefits were trimmed. Pastor Corey Brooks wrote in Fox News that Chicago promised food equity and delivered empty shelves. He blames the government. He’s right. Government should not run grocery stores. I agree with him completely.

He’s right about the diagnosis. The supply line is the next sentence.

Follow me one step at a time, because the arithmetic is the lesson.

My discount chain runs 14 stores across eastern Kentucky. Four registers per store, 47 active registers at peak hours. The flyer was $25 per stool, twelve-month service life. $25 times 47 is $1,175. My registers move 412,000 baskets a year.

Read the bottom line twice. $1,175 ÷ 412,000 = $0.00285 per basket. I round up to $0.0029 for the menu board.

That’s the price of Essie’s knees. That’s the price of the floor mat I declined and the warmth I declined to keep at the registers in February. $1,194.80 per store, per year. $16,727 across the chain, held in my hand because a stool was in a bin. The Lord, who rested on the seventh day, has not asked the operator of a discount grocery to seat the cashier at the register. He has asked me to keep the basket 2.9-tenths of a cent under the chain store one block over. I have kept it under.

Now meet the supply side. The pastor blamed the government for empty shelves. I am the shelves.

Lorena is a pallet jack hand in the distribution warehouse I own south of the Dan Ryan. She runs a manual jack because the powered unit costs $7,200 and the manual one still moves if she leans into it with her right hip. I haven’t replaced the jack. I haven’t replaced Lorena. Both still move, barely, and that’s the margin I run on. Three stores on the South Side of Chicago went dark because I wouldn’t absorb a fee gap of $1,008 over 2 months. The eggs, the bread, the milk on your counter this week came through my dock.

When SNAP dropped 26%, three of my client stores couldn’t pay my distribution invoice on time. Not the amount — the timing. 14 days late, then 21, then 30. My contract says payment on delivery. The day a store misses the window, I stop the truck.

Not punishment. Accounts receivable management.

The food was on my pallets. Tagged, priced, ready to load. The truck was parked outside.

I didn’t load it.

My dock supervisor, Wendell, has been on this floor 11 years. He learned the route-cancellation standard from a man who learned it from me. He is faster with it than I am. On day 31 he closed the route without waiting for my sign-off. I had to ask him to slow down. He has since been promoted.

Here’s where it gets quiet. The SNAP gap across those three stores was roughly $4,200 a week in lost customer spending. My distribution margin was $0.008 per item. If I had reduced my fee by $0.003 per item for the 8 weeks it would have taken SNAP to stabilize: fourteen thousand items a week, three stores, 8 weeks.

$1,008.

Three stores on the South Side of Chicago — shelves bare, families walking to the next block and the next — because I wouldn’t absorb a cost that amounts to $42 a week per store. I kept the $1,008. I’d keep it again — the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. I just take away.

Touch the next number. The powered pallet jack that would save Lorena’s hip costs $7,200 and lasts 15 years. That’s $480 a year, or $0.009 per item across my throughput — one-tenth of a cent more per item than I currently charge her to suffer. The requisition sits on my desk unsigned. The line item stays open. The jack stays manual.

I keep the $1,008. I keep the chair in the bin. The arithmetic is the same arithmetic.

Now widen the frame. This is the principle the case was only an example of.

The grocery shelf is not new. The company store is not new. George Pullman built a town south of Chicago where the only store was his, the only price was his, and the only buyer was his worker — whose rent he also set. The worker earned wages and returned them at the company counter for goods marked up just enough to keep the worker alive and just poor enough to keep the worker coming back. Pullman called it paternalism. I call it distribution logistics. The only thing that changed is the name on the dock and the fact that I don’t also own the apartment. Yet.

“The holding of slaves is justifiable by the doctrine and example contained in Holy writ; and is, therefore, consistent with Christian uprightness, both in sentiment and conduct.”

Richard Furman wrote that in 1823 to the Governor of South Carolina. He was defending the plantation. I am defending a distribution invoice. The sentence structure is identical: the arrangement is righteous because the arrangement is profitable, and profitability is the only audit I run. The pastor prays over the empty shelf. I stock it — or I don’t — based on whether the invoice clears. There is no scripture in an empty shelf. There is the dock.

I’m not unusual. I’m a curriculum. The chair call is taught in the third week of Operations I at the College of Business where I hold the chair. The graduates run the subtraction faster than I do. One of them priced your last grocery job. They sit in the firms that set your wage, and they have priced a thousand chairs since I priced this one. The textbooks I have authored — Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation — are cited in the textbooks your managers now read without attribution. I keep the margin. My graduates keep the larger one. The arrangement is not mine. The arrangement is a class that graduates year after class.

The arrangement was old when Cato told the Roman farmer to sell the worn-out slave before her maintenance exceeded her productive value. It was old when the IG Farben requisition forms my grandfather filed in 1943 priced children at 1.5 Reichsmarks per day, paid by IG Farben to the SS, the children receiving nothing. It was old when your great-grandmother’s employer decided she could stand for the cost of a chair she could not pay for. It is old now, when I keep the chair out of 47 registers because the math demands it, and the math has always demanded it, and the people who refuse to do the math are the people Brooks is preaching to on Fox this week, and they will go on refusing, and the stores will go on opening, and the chair will go on missing, and Essie will go on standing.

The 42,200,000 SNAP participants the Department of Agriculture counted in 2023, across about 22,200,000 households, are my customer base. The cheapest store in their county is mine. The cheapest seat in the cheapest store in the county is the one Essie stands on. The cheapest shelf in the cheapest store on the South Side of Chicago was the one Lorena’s warehouse stopped servicing. The supply chain the pastor blamed the government for runs through my dock. I clear the invoice. The route is closed. The chair stays in the bin.

I haven’t asked what they ate for dinner in the 2 weeks the truck didn’t move. I haven’t asked what Essie’s orthopedist will charge Medicaid when her knees give out. The cost problem is solved on my end. The 25 stores still pay. The route is closed. The dock is quiet. The padlocked storefront on 63rd will reopen at a price I accept, or it won’t open at all. Either outcome is consistent with the margin.

The pastor says the people of Chicago should “demand something better.” Better is what I provide: a distribution chain that moves food at $0.008 per item, at a margin that clears, on terms that don’t depend on the next federal appropriation. The government tried to outperform the market. The market is me. I don’t outperform myself. I close the route that doesn’t pay. The people who needed that route aren’t my route. They’re the pastor’s problem, and he has my full support in finding a solution that doesn’t touch my balance sheet.

Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.