Seven Save A Lot grocery stores operated by Yellow Banana in Chicago are set to close after the company received millions of dollars in city-backed support tied to reopening and maintaining stores in neighborhoods where residents have struggled with limited grocery access.
The Daily Caller’s TheDC Shorts channel highlighted the closures in a recent video, presenting them as an example of taxpayer money being wasted and using the episode to criticize government involvement in grocery access. The underlying story, however, is more complicated than a city simply opening its own supermarkets and watching them fail.
The stores were operated by Yellow Banana, a private Ohio-based company that had agreed to keep the locations open for 10 years under a deal involving more than $13 million in city funding for renovations and reopening costs.
The City Put Millions Behind the Save A Lot Deal
The Daily Caller video begins by revisiting controversy surrounding one of the Save A Lot locations in Englewood.
A news clip included in the video shows residents protesting the planned opening of a Save A Lot store on West 63rd Street near Halsted, with one speaker saying the community did not want the chain there.
The Daily Caller host said the city had committed more than $13 million to Yellow Banana to refurbish and reopen several grocery stores.
At the time, city officials defended the arrangement by emphasizing that Yellow Banana would not simply receive the money upfront.
An ABC7 news clip featured in the video reported that taxpayer money was protected under the contract because the company would only receive funding after a store opened, and the locations were required to remain open for at least 10 years or risk forfeiting the money.
That detail is important because the stores were not directly owned and operated by Chicago, despite the Daily Caller’s broader comparison to government-run grocery proposals elsewhere.
The city was subsidizing a private operator in an effort to keep grocery stores open in underserved areas.
All Seven Stores Are Now Set to Close
That effort has now run into serious trouble.
A news clip cited by TheDC Shorts reported that all seven Save A Lot stores operated by Yellow Banana were scheduled to close, despite the company’s agreement to keep them operating for a decade.
The Daily Caller host called the outcome “poetic” and used it to argue that government-backed grocery projects are inherently prone to failure.
That is a political interpretation rather than an established conclusion.
The immediate reasons offered for the closures were more specific.
According to another news report included in the video, the city attributed the situation in part to the recent death of Yellow Banana’s CEO and reductions in SNAP benefits.
Yellow Banana also said it had seen a 26% drop in SNAP and EBT transactions compared with the previous year.
For stores operating in lower-income neighborhoods, a decline of that size in food-assistance transactions could have a meaningful effect on sales.
The closures therefore appear to involve a mix of business weakness, leadership disruption, and changing purchasing power among customers rather than one simple cause.
Residents Say They Still Need Affordable Grocery Options
The people who stand to lose the most from the closures are the residents who depended on the stores.
One woman interviewed in the news footage said local families needed affordable places to buy food and worried about what would remain once the stores closed.
“We ain’t going nowhere to go,” she said.
Another resident stressed the need for affordable options to feed children.
Those concerns complicate the Daily Caller’s argument because even if the subsidy deal failed to produce stable stores, the underlying problem that motivated the city’s involvement has not disappeared.
If a neighborhood has limited access to full-service grocery stores, the failure of one subsidized operator does not necessarily prove that government should do nothing. It may instead raise questions about whether this particular deal, operator, or business model was workable.
That distinction matters.
A policy can fail without every goal behind it being misguided.
The Daily Caller Tied the Closures to a Larger Political Argument
TheDC Shorts then broadened the discussion beyond Chicago.
The channel brought up the closure of a Safeway in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, where community leaders had criticized the decision and described it as harmful to Black residents.
A news clip featured Reverend Amos Brown saying the closure was “a slap at Black people,” while the NAACP called the timing especially offensive because the store was closing in February.
Another woman, identified in the footage as Lillie Briggs, said it felt as though Black residents were being pushed out.
Safeway, according to the news report included in the Daily Caller video, cited concerns about employee and customer safety along with persistent theft.
The Daily Caller host used those comments to argue that closures in predominantly Black neighborhoods are often blamed on racism instead of business conditions.
But again, that framing turns a complicated economic issue into a political argument.
Store closures can involve crime, operating costs, consumer spending, food-assistance policy, rents, corporate strategy, neighborhood demographics, and a lack of alternative grocery options at the same time.
Reducing the issue to one cause in either direction risks missing why these stores struggle in the first place.
Chicago’s Situation Is Not the Same as a City-Owned Grocery Store
Near the end of the video, the Daily Caller host suggested that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson now had an opportunity to follow New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s example and pursue a city-run grocery store.
The remark was sarcastic and intended to link Chicago’s failed Yellow Banana arrangement with broader progressive proposals for publicly supported grocery stores.
But the situations are not identical.
Chicago’s Save A Lot deal involved public money supporting a private company that continued operating the stores.
A city-owned grocery model would place the government in a much more direct role.
That difference does not make one approach automatically better than the other, but it is necessary for understanding what actually happened in Chicago.
The city did not simply spend $13 million building seven municipal supermarkets and then shut them down. It entered into an agreement with Yellow Banana intended to keep existing grocery locations operating for at least 10 years.
The fact that the stores are closing early raises legitimate questions about how much public money was ultimately paid out, what contractual protections will now apply, and whether any funds can be recovered.
The Closures Leave the Original Problem Unsolved
The Daily Caller’s central criticism is that taxpayers were promised protection and are now watching every one of the stores close anyway.
That concern is fair to examine, especially because the original agreement explicitly tied public funding to long-term operation.
What cannot be determined from the video alone is exactly how much money Yellow Banana ultimately received, how the contract will be enforced after the closures, or what portion of the city’s investment may be recoverable.
Those details will matter when judging the financial outcome.
The more immediate reality for residents is simpler: seven grocery stores are disappearing, while the need for affordable food remains.
Yellow Banana’s reported 26% decline in SNAP and EBT transactions suggests that the customers these stores were meant to serve may themselves be under increasing financial pressure.
That makes the Chicago story less of a clean ideological victory for either side and more of a difficult policy failure with real consequences.
The city’s subsidy arrangement did not deliver the decade of stable grocery access that officials had intended, but the closures also do nothing to solve the problem that led Chicago to intervene in the first place.
For residents who relied on the stores, the debate over whether government should have been involved at all is secondary to a more immediate question: where they are supposed to buy affordable groceries once the doors close.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, John developed a love for the great outdoors early on. With years of experience as a wilderness guide, he’s navigated rugged terrains and unpredictable weather patterns. John is also an avid hunter and fisherman who believes in sustainable living. His focus on practical survival skills, from building shelters to purifying water, reflects his passion for preparedness. When he’s not out in the wild, you can find him sharing his knowledge through writing, hoping to inspire others to embrace self-reliance.
