​POETRY  
          

                          "a brave new world just crash-landed onto my neighborhood" 

                                            Photo by Weebly                                  

Low Margin Blues
by Dennis Sides

My Safeway is only a block, a plaza, and a parking lot away.
Old entry doors are locked—sign points left. Guard’s bracing
an angry young man who’s shouting, “I ain’t got nothin,’ man!”
Inside, access now controlled by one-way gates. I grab a basket,
start on the right, as always. Oh, wait, here’s cheese, not beer.
I walk all 20 aisles to mind-map this new randomized zeitgeist.
Alice-in-Wonderland moment—everything has been shuffled.
Two entire aisles now behind locked display cases. Tall rods
affixed to carts to prevent them from leaving the store. Hmm.
At checkout I ask, “Why the changes?” “It’s the shoplifting –
they’re trying to save the store.” My Rip-Van-Winkle moment.
I’ve shopped here for 25 years, but am now in future shock--
a brave new world just crash-landed onto my neighborhood.
“It’s that bad?” “Yeah, the Market Street store is even worse.”
What? How has it come to this? Save the store? I recall all
recent viral videos of persons and mobs ransacking stores here.
Suddenly, somehow, the city has reverted back to the wild west.
 
My Safeway is a low-margin business—they must sell
boatloads of product to make a profit. I’m on overload, adding
“stores” to rising seas, tornadoes, droughts, fires, floods, wars:
all those troubling tectonic plates shifting uneasily beneath us.
I exit, shaken by my gentrified neighborhood’s dark underbelly.
I’ve long witnessed local homeless selling $5 chocolate bars
for $1 to old folks in the senior day-care center next door.
“We have to survive!” a woman wailed, when I asked what’s up.
On the way home I pull a small clamshell of half-eaten sheet cake
out of our hedge. The day is warm, but I shiver, hearing
the faint strains of the “Low-Margin Blues.”
 
Afterword:
Ten months later Safeway announces that they’ll close the store in two months and will sell the property to a developer who will build out a mixed-use housing and commercial space. Safeway will not be one of the commercial tenants. The store was there for 40 years,
and its absence will turn the neighborhood into a “food desert.”
 
But, two weeks later, after much public outcry, Safeway agreed to keep the store open for an additional ten months. And then? No one could save it, and the store closed officially on Feb 7, 2025.

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Dennis Sides has been a software developer, book editor, professional musician, construction project manager, tech writer, and world traveler. He's hung up his traveling shoes during COVID, but hopes to get back out on the road soon. He's lived in the Fillmore long enough to qualify for "San Francisco native" status.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry:
The Tip of the Spear

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