Kroger is one of America's largest, most profitable grocery chains, with $2b in profits in 2019. Ohio just gave it a 15-year, 75% tax subsidy in exchange for locating some data centers in the state. Pat Garofalo offers some sharp comments on the deal.
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The answer: Kroger's starting a "ghost kitchen" sideline. That's when giant corporations set up predatory sweatshops in shipping containers where employees (misclassified as contractors) earn sub-minimum-wage pennies to produce delivery meals.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle
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These are often owned or partnered with delivery apps, and, like delivery apps, they use investor cash to subsidize both the food and the delivery, losing money on each transaction, in a bid to drive out local, productive restaurant businesses.
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Ghost kitchens ARE data-intensive, because their corporate masters do deep analysis from their predatory delivery business to find vulnerable local restaurants to clone and drive out of business, replacing searches for the local eatery with their ghost-kitchen knock-off.
And Kroger doesn't even need to tap its investors to subsidize the destruction of Ohio's beloved local restaurants - already weakened by the pandemic and weak stimulus for small businesses, especially bars and restaurants.
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The Ohio taxpayers - including restaurants that will be driven out of business by this subsidy - are footing the bill for it.
The sadists of China's Cultural Revolution would execute your dad and send you a bill for the bullet. In America, we're much more genteel.
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Data center subsidies are the ultimate sucker-bet. States and cities that subsidize data-centers to get local jobs end up spending $2 million (up to $6m!) PER JOB. Data centers are expensive but they also employ very few people, after all.
https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/facebook-and-the-data-center-scam
Now, you may be asking yourself, wait, why does a grocery chain - even one with $2B/year in profits - need a pair of data centers? Groceries are a data-intensive business, but they're not THAT data-intensive.
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