Beyond the Headlines podcast: Would Wilmington curtail corner stores?

Reporter Brianna Hill is back on the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to take us with her as she hit the street, particularly street corners, for her Sept. 7 story, “Should Wilmington temporarily ban new corner stores?” 

There are dozens of these stores across Delaware’s biggest city, and they’ve become a flashpoint for many. Brianna talks about how she sourced the community voices for the story, some of the surprising points of view that made their way into her reporting and shares a few encounters on the street that didn’t make it into the article.

The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

All right, so why don’t we start with our “Hey mom” question here. So you’ll literally start with, “Hey, mom, I wrote this article about corner stores in Wilmington …” and then just tell her what the story’s about and why she should be interested in it.

OK. Hey, mom. I wrote this article about corner stores in Wilmington, and it’s possible that there may not be any new ones anytime soon because of a city proposal that wants to slow down the development of new corner stores, and instead implement places that offer better food options and better support the community.

You talk about slowing down the development of these stores, and these are stores that many of us pass by every day. They do seem to be around a lot. But many of us don’t think too much about them. You know, we just kind of see them, but they don’t process for us. Why did you, Editor-in-Chief Jake Owens and Deputy Editor Karl Baker, decide that this was a Spotlight Delaware story?

Well, one, it’s a public policy issue because this is a city ordinance that’s being proposed. So it falls under that category of public policy. Also, like you said, we pass by these stores every day, but they are really important places to have in the community considering that there is a food desert in Wilmington. And in Delaware, a lot of people have to travel for food and may not always have the means to do so.

So it’s also a community issue that people care about regardless of what side they fall on. 

There are countless ordinances that pop up in Wilmington City Council. You don’t cover them all. So what, grabbed your eye about this ordinance when you saw it come across?

I would say Councilwoman Shané Darby is someone in the city who often proposes things that are pretty progressive, like the rent stabilization ordinance. This one kind of was in the middle. 

Corner stores are in majority low-income neighborhoods, and they can often be back-to-back. There’s a lot of them. So we can understand why people would want them there, but Darby is saying, no, we don’t want anymore. In the story, and from talking to people, it was clear that there’s people on both sides. Some people want them, and some people understand why Darby doesn’t want them anymore, and why she wants to offer better food options and different opportunities for people in those areas.

So when you were last on the podcast, you were talking about City Councilperson Shané Darby again, because we were talking about her efforts to, as you just referenced, introduce the rent stabilization measure. Darby is also the sponsor of this corner store ordinance.

Spotlight Delaware articles start with this, “Why Should Delaware Care?” box. Why does Darby care about this issue? What would be her “box” for this ordinance?

Darby cares about this issue because, from her perspective, the city is oversaturated with these stores. Corner stores aren’t bringing in healthy foods, and some of them invite loitering and can create spaces for criminal activity like drug sales to occur.

And I think in her mind there are better and healthier stores that can be placed throughout the city, especially in these low-income areas. 

You talked about Darby frequently introducing some more of the progressive measures that come across City Council. On first glance, I don’t know if I actually see this as a progressive issue.

What about this ordinance strikes you as, “Oh, this fits into that line of these progressive measures that Darby tends to propose”? 

I think, also at first glance, I was a little confused because I wasn’t sure where she was headed with it. But I think I understand that she’s trying to create some equity in these areas that may not always have it.

Because not every corner store has fresh produce and things like that, and it’s usually quick to-go snacks, chips, cookies and things like that. So her wanting to create spaces in these communities where there are better foods and maybe better community engagement  – that makes sense and wanting that in these areas where people can’t usually get it.

 Your editor, Deputy Editor Karl Baker, likes to talk about shoe-leather journalism, which means getting out on the street, walking about in your shoes and getting sources for your story that are regular people.

In your drafting process for this story, was there a version that just consisted of comments from council members and the mayor’s office? A version that didn’t involve shoe-leather journalism? 

Yeah. In the beginning, when I first learned about the ordinance, I thought it could have been a quick turnaround story just to let people know that it was being proposed so they could be informed and either contact Darby for their support or opposition and attend the committee meeting where the ordinance would be fully discussed. 

But when we talked about it in our editorial meeting, I think it was Karl who brought up, “You should talk to some people.” And, because I had more time, it just made more sense to get some more public opinion about the proposal.

You just used the phrase a quick-turn story. What is a quick-turn story? 

It’s something like a daily. If there’s a proposal coming out, we would say what the proposal is doing, the sponsor of the proposal, maybe some comments from them and, if we can, some other city council members to maybe give people a sense of how they’re gonna vote.

And then of course, the mayor’s office, to see if they’re in support of it. Just to kind of let people know what’s going on. Sometimes we’ll do fuller stories where we kind of dig in deep. So if I had done a more quick turnaround story, it would’ve just been short: here’s a proposal, here’s when it’s being proposed, and contact the bill sponsor. 

So sometimes there is a need for a quick-turn story in the Spotlight Delaware world. But I think one of the things that helps to differentiate Spotlight Delaware is giving the reporters time to say, “Hey, you know what, this can go deeper than a quick-turn story.”

So once you decided, OK, this isn’t just going to be a quick-turn, we’re not just going to have the council people and the mayor’s office, what was your process for sourcing the community voices? Did you get contacts from other reporters or was it just all you out on the street?

My colleague and fellow reporter, José Ignacio Castañeda Perez, gave me three contacts. And they were all actually used in the story, which was great. The first one was Rebecca Gomez, the owner of the Dominican Cafe Mini Market. The other was Joyce Woodland, the local hair boutique owner. And the third was Iz Balleto, the community advocate and the cultural program director for the Delaware Art Museum.

So those were good perspectives to get because we had a shop owner, a resident who kind of works around these corner stores and kind of has her opinions about them. And then we have another community advocate who also lives in the community and shared some opposition to the proposal.

When I went out to kind of chat with those people in the Hilltop area, I went around to other corner stores in the area and it wasn’t hard to find them because they are everywhere. I tried to talk to different corner store shop owners or just employees and it didn’t really seem like a lot of them wanted to chat with me.

I think some people have some reservations about being in a news story, or how they’ll be perceived or maybe some backlash they would get.

Most of the time if you show up in a news story, it’s not for the best reasons.

Yeah. Pretty much 

I would say the residents were definitely easier to get perspective from. They were more willing to talk, not all the time, but I got three other people to chat with and they gave me some good perspective on how they felt about the bill.

So once you did the work, building on those sources that José Ignacio put you in contact with, doing your own sourcing, how did you feel those voices ended up influencing the story? 

I think they gave the story a lot of good substance because at that point I wasn’t just reporting on a city proposal.

The story became more community-driven, and I think having all those sides – the store owners, the residents who like the stores, the residents who don’t – it was impactful to not only show what the proposal was and how people felt about it, but showing how it would impact people if it were to be passed. I think that was good for the story and good for people to understand.

You talk about the different perspectives. There were perspectives that I didn’t expect to find in the article. Toward the end of the story, you got into the subject of providing healthier food in these stores.

Which seems like a no-brainer, but as you pursued it, you realized there’s more to it than that. You talked to two corner store owners or managers who talked about the challenges of stocking healthier food – mainly that there wasn’t enough demand from customers for healthier food and the food would spoil.

Can you just reflect on that a little bit? Is that a perspective that you were expecting as you were going out and talking to people? 

It was not a perspective I expected to hear from the store owners.

Because even myself, growing up in Philadelphia, I didn’t really see a lot of fresh produce in corner stores to know that. So to know that they were doing it in these stores, or at least trying it, and it just didn’t work, that was interesting because I never had the thought as a kid going into a corner store, “I want fruit.”

Usually I want candy. So it definitely made sense and even from talking to a few residents who didn’t make it in the story, it was noted that, yes, fresh fruit would be nice, but you know, that’s not what my kids want. They want chips and they want something quick to eat; or cheese fries from behind the counter or something like that.

So I definitely think that it’s important for city council to maybe understand that perspective. These are store owners and they are business owners, so if they’re going out of their way to put something on their shelves, but it’s costing them money because they’re not getting their return back, then it’s gonna be hard for them to do it anyway, especially if they’re serving a community that doesn’t want it.

In the article you referenced a study from about eight or so years ago, that said, “When grocery stores come into these ‘food deserts’ that really only moves the needle like 9% toward healthier outcomes of getting people to actually want to eat these food.” There’s these socioeconomic, there are cultural, lots of other factors that lead people not to grabbing that healthy food. 

Did any of the mayor’s representatives or the council people wrestle with this thing that, ‘Hey, maybe this ordinance on itself is not gonna be enough, that there’s other factors going into creating healthier outcomes’?

The mayor’s office expressed that they would want to see healthier foods in the community in Wilmington. They had mentioned that they were working on a project with Widener University, to kind of incentivize some type of healthy food options in these types of stores.

That makes sense. If the owners are trying it, it’s not working, they’re spending their own money, they’re not gonna do it anymore. Then if that’s something that the state or the city wants to do, then I feel like it would have to be incentivized. 

But yeah, there’s a lot of other factors to it because if you grow up in a low-income area and you’re on a strict budget, you are probably going to lean toward more processed foods because they’re cheaper. So if that’s what you grew up on and that’s what you’re used to, and you go into a store and now there’s a fruit salad, you have to pick between that and the snacks you usually get, you’re probably gonna buy those processed snacks.

And this also gets at the question we asked earlier about why this is a progressive issue. And it just makes me think that historically, in a lot of low-income neighborhoods, there weren’t great grocery stores, right? And so what you get used to in that neighborhood is the processed stuff and the not-so-great stuff.

And so even when that option is provided, you’re like, well, that’s not what I’m used to because of what’s been 20, 30, 40, 50 years of the options you’ve had in your neighborhood. 

I think Darby is trying to promote equity. But the community is not used to that equity in terms of the types of food that they have access to. So I think people are just like, “OK, you can do that. That’s nice, but are we gonna eat it? We don’t know.”

You mentioned that there were voices from your time in the corner stores and walking the neighborhood, that didn’t make it into the article. Anything staying with you right now that you wish could get in the article? You can get in now during this podcast.

Yeah. So, around the corner from Bill’s Corner Store, there were a few residents kind of just talking on their porch, and I went up to this one woman and we were talking about the issue. And I think something that she said resonated with me. 

She was opposed to not having more corner stores in the city because she pointed out that the corner store has become like a part of the community. They’re a part of her family because her kids, you know, they grew up in the neighborhood. They go there after school or before school. So the store owners become familiar with the families in the neighborhood and you kind of build a reputation with them, or just a good relationship with them.

So say one day you go in there and you don’t have enough to get some food that you usually want. The store owner may let you slide by and say, ‘You can take it, pay me back later,’ or something like that. So it’s a different type of relationship as if you put an Acme there. They’re not gonna do that, or there’s not going to be that type of close relationship that those store owners built within the community.

These streets are wild. Anything just kind of weird happen to you as you were out trying to get voices for the story? 

So I was out in the Hilltop area and I was looking for resident voices and, you know, I should have just stuck with the people who were coming in and out of the store.

But I did encounter a group of people who were kind of sitting up against this, I guess block. I went up to them to talk to them about the ordinance and didn’t realize that there were kind of half empty liquor bottles next to them. So that was probably my first time to leave, but I was asking questions and some of them were like, ‘I’m outta here. I do not want to be targeted by the government. I do not wanna be in the news.’ And then one lady was actually speaking with me, but she was a little dysfunctional. She was talking to me and trying to understand what I was saying about the ordinance, but she kind of just kept asking the same questions about, “What will this do?”

And I was like, well, it may stop more corner stores from coming into the city. And she’s like, yeah, but what will it do? And it was a probably good 20 minutes of back-and-forth between her. And then she made a comment about how she was old enough to be my mom, and then she said, “But if I were 20 years younger.”  And all her friends were like, girl, stop that.

So yeah, you meet some characters out there. It was a funny experience. I wasn’t in any danger. Very funny experience to look back on, but definitely as a reporter out there, you’ve got to pay attention to your surroundings because I would’ve avoided that if I had seen the empty beer bottles.

So do you think she’s going to hear this podcast? 

She might because she actually ended up signing up for the newsletter after I convinced her after saying multiple times that I wasn’t trying to scam her. I showed her our website and she signed up. So she might hear this. 

That’s community engagement in action. Good work, Bri!

To end, let’s circle back to policy again. In your article you said this was going to be talked about at a Sept. 11 meeting of council, but that didn’t happen. Can you share a little bit about why, and then what the current state of it is and how people can perhaps get involved if they want to?

The ordinance was supposed to go to the Community Development and Urban Planning Committee meeting on Sept. 11, but Darby was excused from that meeting and asked for the committee to hold the proposal. So she didn’t present it in committee yet, and it wasn’t discussed. 

The next meeting for that committee is on Oct. 9. The agenda for that meeting isn’t up yet, but people should save that date because it could be the next time that it’s discussed.

Thank you for bringing so many voices to this story, Brianna, and letting people know how they can take action if they want to.