I appreciate that this was written from a vendor point of view, since there’s not enough of that out there. Moreover, I think we need a national awareness campaign about how markets have begun to adeptly organize themselves around diverse shopping bases while also paying attention to the deep needs of their farmers and producers. That strategy  makes them unique within the food system since markets have to constantly manage the social and human benefits along with the economic ones.
What strikes me as unsaid in this piece and in so many that I read is that time must be taken to explain to the users of markets about  organizers using different strategies to achieve these goals, including selecting different vendor groups based on location, choosing locations either embedded deep within a targeted area or on the edge between multiple zip codes, while creating different sets of incentives to achieve those goals. As long as people think that markets see themselves as a one-type-fits-all, we will constantly struggle with our impacts when seeking support from folks like the USDA, city government and private funders. You can hear that struggle in the comments about “pricing” in this piece.

How to bring farmers markets to the urban poor – The Washington Post.