For over a decade, Anga Sanders has been working to get a supermarket in her corner of southern Dallas.
When a Tom Thumb got $5.8 million in incentives from the city to come to the Shops at RedBird in 2023, Sanders thought she might see that moment.
The store, originally planned to open early this year, was expected to be a step toward addressing residents’ push for quality food options in an area with limited access to groceries.
Then, Sanders learned that it wouldn’t be coming.
“It’s another slap in the face,” Sanders said. “Am I disappointed? Absolutely. Am I surprised? Absolutely not.”
Sanders, along with several other southern Dallas residents, told The Dallas Morning News the canceled Tom Thumb plans, revealed in a December city memo, left them questioning why the supermarket chain wasn’t coming.
A spokesperson for Albertsons Companies Inc., Tom Thumb’s parent company, said the decision was made “after discussions with the City of Dallas and a thorough economic evaluation.” A spokesperson did not respond to requests for further comment via phone and email.
Sanders said she wasn’t giving up on bringing a new grocer to the area.
She believed the company bought into “misperceptions of who lives in southern Dallas and what we can afford and what we like.”
Other residents also said misperceptions about the area — whether it was crime, income, shopping habits or other factors — drove the decision. Some questioned whether the failed merger with Kroger or the opening of a nearby Joe V’s Smart Shop, a low-price concept from H-E-B, had an impact.
Several told The News they drive outside of their neighborhood or outside of the city to grocery shop. The developer of RedBird mall, Peter Brodsky, said he’s heard the disappointment.
“People were very excited about the prospect of being able to shop in a high-quality grocery store like Tom Thumb near their homes, and they’re disappointed and perplexed as to why this wouldn’t have happened,” Brodsky said.
In 2015, Sanders founded FEED Oak Cliff with the goal of recruiting corporate grocers south of Interstate 30. Since then, the organization has taken matters into its own hands, working toward a community-based grocery store, a grab-and-go restaurant next door and a rentable commercial kitchen for local cooks to scale their operations.
In April 2023, the City Council approved incentives for the Tom Thumb with property tax abatements and sales tax grants for a 50,000-square-foot supermarket that would bring a minimum of 90 jobs. RedBird was supposed to spend at least $12 million on the building and site work. Tom Thumb would make at least $5 million on improvements for fixtures and to finish out the building.
At the time, the southern half of Dallas has 54% of the land mass but too few of the city’s grocery stores, Sanders said in emails to the council asking they vote in favor of the incentives. She wrote that she lived 3 miles from RedBird and often drove 10 to 15 miles to shop at a Tom Thumb north of Interstate 30.
With Tom Thumb pulling out of the plans, not much has changed, she told The News.
“We have a lot of food dollars to spend, that we spend outside our community,” Sanders said. “There’s really not that much in our community to purchase in the way of quality food because of the lack of sufficient numbers of quality grocery stores.”
DeNita Lacking-Quinn, board secretary for Southern Dallas Progress Community Development Corporation, was among residents who compared the Tom Thumb to Joe V’s, the low-price concept from H-E-B, which sits less than two miles from the planned supermarket.
Some residents said they appreciated the store for its resources, but said it’s been busy and didn’t have everything they were looking forward to in a Tom Thumb.
Lacking-Quinn said when she sees how full that Joe V’s gets, she knows “we would spend money at Tom Thumb if we had the opportunity.” She said Tom Thumb pulling out of the southern Dallas location felt like rejection.
“It’s like we’re not worthy,” Lacking-Quinn said, adding, “We have to go to Waxahachie to go to a real H-E-B…There’s so many other cities that have blocks and blocks and blocks of grocery stores, but it’s like y’all don’t see that we need the same thing.”
Tiffany Hubbard, a chef who lives in the area and volunteers with Southern Dallas Progress CDC, said a supermarket like Tom Thumb would also offer a wider selection to help residents build familiarity with nutritious foods. Hubbard said she was “crestfallen” when Joe V’s Smart Shop opened. She didn’t feel like the store offered the full array of fresh produce and other groceries that should be available to the community.
“If you want them to shop and you want them to understand food, give them food choices,” Hubbard said.
A spokesperson for Albertsons told The News in a December email the company was “committed to providing no-fee delivery” to ZIP codes closest to the location and was “in active discussions with stakeholders and community leaders on other ways we can support the community.”
The offer of no-fee delivery, however, is not a replacement for a physical store. Residents asked about older people who didn’t shop online and others who didn’t have access to technology. Others saw the offer as an insult.
Sanders said that she found the no-fee delivery sends a message about who the company wants to shop in its store.
“What you’re saying is, ‘We’ll find a way to take your money,’” Sanders said. “‘We just don’t want you in our store. So we’re not going to build a store.’”
Sandra Alridge, Singing Hills Neighborhood Association president, said grocery delivery “denies us of an experience if we wanted to go into the store and look at the produce and the meat.”
She said those are items she doesn’t buy without inspecting.
Alridge took issue with how residents learned Tom Thumb canceled its plans.
“They didn’t even have the decency to tell us why,” Alridge said. “I don’t think that the grocery stores are being honest and candid with us, and so for them to make an announcement like that with no details, that’s ridiculous. That’s absolutely ridiculous. So, let’s start there.”
Alridge believes city leaders should be stepping up to form relationships with grocers and help solve the issue.
“I just think that they’re missing a huge opportunity to stop the bleeding,” Alridge said.
Sanders and others told The News they would like a new grocery study, either from the city or privately, of the area. They believe it would show there is support for the desired supermarket.
Edward Rincón, a local researcher, said he’s worked with grocery companies. He said decades-long stereotypes about southern Dallas have been “substituted for real research” in the past.
A supermarket, he said, wouldn’t only provide food but other resources, like a pharmacy.
“They always talk about population density, issues, unemployment, poverty, crime rates and the lack of income … and you get a whole litany of social indicators that almost mean nothing when it comes to food expenditures,” Rincón said.
Rincón is president of Rincón & Associates LLC, a Dallas-based market research firm. In 2020, he collaborated with Chetan Tiwari, then an associate professor at the University of North Texas, to study the absence of mainstream supermarkets in southern Dallas. They developed a tool to help identify low-income communities where supermarkets are needed.
“It’s not that we didn’t look at unemployment rate or other social indicators, but we wanted to look at what people usually don’t look at, which is their economic power,” Rincón said. They found is that the demand for a supermarket exists, he said.
Brodsky, the developer of the RedBird mall area, said there was a grocery study done around 2016 to market the area, but “it might be a good idea to refresh” it. Brodsky said it’s now time to begin “really making the case that we make all the time at RedBird, which is that this is a fundamentally misunderstood community.”
He said the purchasing power in the community is underestimated. A “high-quality” grocery store was at the top of the list of amenities requested, which Brodsky said he’s committed to providing.
“We spent a little time at the end of last year licking our wounds,” Brodsky said. “We came back re-energized this year, and we are going to start aggressively marketing the site to other grocery stores that hit the quality level that the community is looking for.”
Sanders said, “We’re not stopping” and she and Brodsky are already considering other grocers to approach.
“What greater injustice is there than denying people access to quality, fresh, healthy food,” Sanders said. “That is life-changing. It is life-limiting in a very literal sense.”
This reporting is part of the Future of North Texas, a community-funded journalism initiative supported by the Commit Partnership, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, the McCune-Losinger Family Fund, The Meadows Foundation, the Perot Foundation, the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and the University of Texas at Dallas. The News retains full editorial control of this coverage.