A year and a half after Albertsons shut the Safeway store on San Francisco’s Webster Street, Fillmore native Donna Hunter still runs into her neighbors, fellow grocery-shopping refugees, in the produce or frozen food aisles of the chain’s other stores on Market Street or the Inner Richmond.
“When you meet your neighbors at other Safeways, or you bump into the employees you knew from the old store, we all talk about how much we miss our Safeway,” she said. “It was a community center. We are lonely without it.”
On Saturday, Hunter was one of about 75 residents who attended a meeting at the African American Art & Culture Complex on Fulton Street focused on finding a new community-led model for getting groceries to a neighborhood that has been let down in recent years by the big chains…