Be Afraid. Be Very, Very Afraid. That’s the advice I gave my old companera Dion Aroner last week, when I passed her on my way out of the meeting at Perata School last week which is written up elsewhere in this issue. The topic at hand was the Safeway corporation’s plans to put its current slightly dowdy local supermarket, which now occupies most of one leg of the scary, crowded multi-street intersection of College and Claremont on the Elmwood-Rockridge (Berkeley-Oakland) border, on steroids. Aroner was there in the Madame Defarge slot, hanging around in the back of the room, taking notes, saying nothing. Her firm has been hired to be the political fixers in Safeway’s ongoing drive to, shall we say, fully exploit its urban landholdings by turning four or five East Bay neighborhood stores into a new business model which promises to combine the worst features of Wal-Mart and a strip mall.
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