Two bottle of Hennessy, three strikes you're out
California's Proposition 20 is a disaster that brings up all kinds of discomfort in my own position as a business owner selling to grocery stores.
Yesterday I read with horror Suhauna Hussain’s coverage in the LA Times about Proposition 20 in California (h/t The Counter whose food journalism and roundups I have really appreciated.) In the piece she reports that many grocery chains throughout the Golden State, in connection with the California Grocers Association, have put money behind a bill that would increase the penalty for shoplifting. She opens with the story of Brian Beinlich who faces three consecutive life sentences for stealing… wait for it… two bottles of Hennessy from a CostCo. In a state that still holds its Three-Strikes Law in place, which gives an inmate 25 years to life if convicted of three felonies, Beinlich is one of 10,000-plus inmates whose Draconian punishment is tragically outsized compared to the crime.
The article does a beautiful job with the details, so I’ll let you read it for yourself, but to give a general picture: the grocer’s lobby claims the best way to prevent a perceived increase in shoplifting (which, it turns out, isn’t happening within grocery stores) is harsher punishment. In other words, they want Broken Windows Policing. It’s just one more example of powerful institutions that refuse to look at social problems as systemic. Instead, buying into a mythos of individualism, they put the blame on one person for breaking the rules of this miserable game—without ever questioning the game and their role in it. Over and over again, it’s an individual’s fault. Even as they post Black Lives Matter signs in their windows and hashtags in their posts, they hypocritically go against the movement’s core principles. They look to police and prisons as a solution rather than questioning their abusive role maintaining and creating problems.
It’s always painful to think about what good could have been achieved if all the money spent lobbying for businesses’ warped ideas of self-interest were redirected into its staff, suppliers, and the community. Please, Californians, do not vote for Proposition 20.
The reason this jumped out at me, amid all the other jarring, harsh news of the day (in a city, Portland, choked by smoke), is that my business is just beginning to sell into California, into some of these chains. And as a teeny-tiny business with a huge amount of intention in what we do but nonetheless very little influence, I wasn’t sure what to do. We could demand that these stores rescind their pledges in support of Proposition 20. But what happens next? If they say no, would we stop selling to grocery stores in California entirely? And then what? I have decided not to sell through Amazon. Does this mean I shrink the business? We would then buy less organic flour, rethink our staffing, and have even less influence. Not to mention that almost all grocery stores belong to lobbies just like this one. I will likely face similar dilemmas many times as I navigate running a food business in the 21st century. This may sound defeatist, or like a rationale to let myself off the hook, but really I am processing and trying to think like a strategist playing the long game.
Where does this leave me, aside from writing about this here? It makes me wonder about the grocery workers unions, where they stand on Proposition 20, and how to support them. It also makes me begin to dream about a large coalition of small vendors—and it would have to be strong and focused—that makes a series of value-driven commitments to one another, their employees, and their suppliers that allow them to say with authority: No. We will not participate in lobby groups that prioritize profits over people and we demand you stop funding equivalent lobby groups. The anti-lobby lobby.
This also brings up one of my favorite and least favorite topics: complicity. If any of us thinks on it, we recognize that there is no such thing as worldly existence without complicity within systems we may abhor—in this moment I am thinking of racial capitalism. In acknowledging that, we are not absolved from the constant fight. But also, there is no one way to fight oppressive systems, no single model that is the right way. You may boycott these grocery stores, but it doesn’t necessarily give you a moral high ground over, for example, a grocery checker who works there and sometimes sneaks groceries, or even a bottle or two of Hennessy, out the door. I am reminded of my mom’s regular malapropism from my childhood: to get off my high chair. The question is how, in your life, in my life, in the place on earth that we each inhabit, we can stay present and rebellious.
This uncomfortable pickle I am in ethically also reminds me of something I heard Fred Moten say in this incredible conversation from 2018. He talked about the danger of believing you are not complicit and how that belief can alienate you from your life, your community, your responsibilities. And he said this, which I will return to again and again:
I just think it’s really important that we organize ourselves in relation to ourselves before we organize ourselves in relation to them—and sometimes there’s a kind of righteousness and a kind of moral purity that people can imagine they have attained strictly as a function of the evil of their object, the evil of their antagonist, and I think that’s a dangerous pathway to go.