Allegheny Township Giant Eagle ceases food collections - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Here we find a more local followup to my previous blog about large corporations taking over the sense of community.
I am aware of these local towns and Giant Eagle, the largest grocery purveyor in W. PA and NE Ohio.
Long ago, Giant Eagle was a small local geoup with a strong sense of community, local roots, and a humanitatian outlook.
In fact, 30 or 35 years ago, Giant Eagle corporate owned stores encouraged such drives covering a plethora of causes.
I personally participated in one for the Johnstown, PA flood of 1976 and management was very co-operative in all aspects of the drive.

But, as all good things Giant Eagle became a mega corporation with large overstocked stores that make shopping a dreaded chore with the choices, artfully laid out aisles to induce one to buy, the cooking & baking aromas used to lure shoppers to high priced items & precooked meals that are probably over purchased and wasted, indifferent management & staff, and the privacy killing policy of tracking purchases. Self serve checkouts, which are often proven to be inacurrate & hard to rectify were started, furthur reducing the work staff at a closely held & privately owned business.

The edges lost by these self serving corporate decesions hopefully take the edge off Giant Eagle and other mega stores, returning to the pleasurable and customer service oriented experiences of the smaller locally owned and charitable stores.
Somewhere the mega store concept has to be challenged as it destroys jobs and charity. I for one, a Giant Eagle shopper in the past, stopped shopping there because of over priced goods, poor customer service, and do as much small store shopping as I can, including independently owned stores that purvey fresher meats, fruits, & vegetables, serve with a smile and helpful attitude, and even small stores like ALDI and Save-A-Lot that do not overwhelm me. The selections at the smaller stores change more often and allow me to try different foods that I would not find in the mega supermarkets. And these small stores often offer local products that cannot compete with food manufacurer paid for shelf space at the mega stores, furthuring decimating the economy. It is indecent, immoral, and unethical that manufacturers actually pay for the best shelf space and crowd out the local fresher products.

Think factory farms like Tyson, Smithfield & others and their inhumane treatment of animals, antibiotics, cancerous tumors, and the rest that gets reported. I am not an animal rights advocate, but I believe that we deserve freedom from over medicated sources, freedom from the gross use of antibiotics, freedom from genticially manipulated foods, and just all around cleaner foods that are more often found in community based farms.



Allegheny Township Giant Eagle ceases food collections - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review