For months, our local community has buzzed with anticipation for the opening of the new Giant Eagle Market District Express, a test case grocery store featuring an inside restaurant.
The store is lovely and succinct, providing students with a viable alternative for quick meals and amenities, like the salad bar, all in one place. The convenient location and amiability toward foot traffic provide friendly competition to the substandard commercial services on campus.
I’ve lived in Bexley for three years, and worked here for one. This is my last year in this community, so the arrival of the Market District affects my consumer habits quite differently than those incoming first-years.
What strikes me about the Giant Eagle are not the student friendly amenities, but the lack of amenities that benefit the local community.
Prior to its opening, the most convenient place to shop for most residents of Southeast Bexley was the Main Street Kroger: a small store with an anxiety-inducing parking lot, but one within reasonable walking distance offering the necessities of any grocery store. Like any Kroger, the prices were reasonable, and, as a Kroger Plus member, one could rack up considerable savings on their weekly groceries.
The question I am left with, after having toured the new Giant Eagle, is that of its contribution to the greater Bexley community.
The prices are higher, the parking lot is small and just as nightmarish as the Main Street Kroger, its two stories make shopping for a family clunky and untenable, its Kosher selection is far below the selection afforded by the Broad Street Kroger, and the craft beer and tobacco selection barely contests the small and friendly Lucky Lotto of Livingston.
As we students revel in our newfound campus grocer, we must take a step back to understand the significance of the store in the larger Bexley-Columbus community.
Bexley is a village notorious for its size and wealth. A stroll through scenic North Bexley gives one an understanding of the economic situation of many of its residents.
However, if one walks too far east or west, they will be shocked by the apparent wealth disparity, and this wealth disparity is the contradiction upon which our community lies.
Bexley’s own police force, often seen investigating petty theft and breaking up Sheridan parties promptly at 9:30p.m., enforces the village boundary to simulate the experience of a large, gated community.
Living in a community of such affluence juxtaposed to poverty requires a great deal of bad faith, and the Giant Eagle Market District serves to amplify the socioeconomic segregation.
The neighborhoods that lie beyond the borders of Bexley, Columbus and Whitehall, ought not to be any less our responsibility as urban citizens. The disparity in wealth and income is not a natural occurrence, but one that is made deliberate by those with power, and justified through the tacit consent of those who benefit.
The Main Street Kroger, while tame and banal itself, served as a valuable liminal space between the communities of Bexley and Columbus. Though inter-communal dialogue was unlikely to occur there on a grand scale, one could get a sense of difference by listening and speaking to those from the other side of Alum Creek.
Furthermore, purchases at the Kroger served to benefit the economies of both communities, whereas the Giant Eagle will keep Bexley money in Bexley.
Distasteful and disrespectful names and phrases, such as “Kroghetto,” a pejorative for the Main Street Kroger, are also sure to flourish in our colloquial language as a result of the new Giant Eagle.
The ability to ignore or rationalize the stark difference between two bordering communities is a banal phenomenon in which our community is far too complicit.
With one less reason to leave the gated community, it becomes more difficult to understand the affairs of the communities that lie beyond.
Sure, we can hide and prosper behind our walls of concrete bridges and economic plenty, but we are doomed to continue the banal practices that create vastly different and unequal urban experiences until the community as a whole takes responsibility for and action against the segregation they benefit from.
Though we may live in this “City on a Hill,” it is imperative that it not be the solipsistic echo chamber it may become.
Nick Bochenek is a senior philosophy and history major, president of philosophy club and SSU, who plans to attend grad school in philosophy after graduation.
