It's not fine.

A growing number of SF residents are waking up to the fact that the city's dominant grocery chain is charging absurd markups on staples while budget alternatives sit right under our noses. Amazon-owned Whole Foods — yes, the store we used to mock as "Whole Paycheck" — is now routinely undercutting Safeway on comparable items. Their store-brand products are especially competitive. When Whole Foods is the budget play, something has gone deeply wrong with the market.

As one local put it bluntly: "Safeway is exclusively a rip off. They're only worth the sales and deals you find in their app. I only go into the store with a set list of discounted items and never buy beyond that." That's not grocery shopping — that's couponing as a survival strategy.

Meanwhile, smaller outlets are quietly delivering real value. Grocery Outlet has had eggs at a dollar a dozen for months. Lunardi's reportedly had jumbo eggs from Petaluma Farms for $1.89 as recently as this week — a price that, as one SF resident marveled, "blows my mind. I haven't seen eggs that cheap in ages."

So why do places like Safeway get away with it? Because in too many SF neighborhoods, they face zero real competition. The city's labyrinthine permitting process makes opening a new grocery store a Herculean task. Regulations that were supposedly designed to protect consumers end up insulating incumbents from the market pressure that would force prices down.

Now, we're not here to shill for Amazon. There's a legitimate concern that mega-corporations are using grocery as a loss leader to hoover up consumer data and crush local businesses in the long run. That trade-off deserves scrutiny.

But the immediate problem is this: working San Franciscans are paying a tax on food that has nothing to do with actual costs and everything to do with a broken competitive landscape. City Hall could help by making it easier — not harder — for new grocers to open up shop. More competition means lower prices. It's not complicated economics. It's Economics 101, which apparently nobody at City Hall ever took.