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How supermarkets choose where to open and close

93 points by Mz 9y ago

gxs 9y ago
Interesting. A quick search in the bay area seems to confirm, at least to some extent, the article's findings. https://imgur.com/a/PwABV https://imgur.com/a/PwABV I searched the east bay for Safeways. Rockridge, Piedmont, Montclair, Alameda (all better off areas): check, check, and check. If you see the area south of downtown Oakland all the way down to almost San Leandro is completely devoid of all Safeways. In my experience of driving through those areas, they are mostly served by discount stores like FoodMax, Food4less, or other ethnic stores. No real point here other than I checked what the article said and it seems to jive with reality.
- deleted 9y ago
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- Macsenour 9y ago
  As I'm local to you, I'll add that a Nob Hill Foods is in Alameda, a higher rent location, with a Foodmax on the Oakland side.
OscarTheGrinch 9y ago
Mingy little versions of supermarkets represent a contraction of consumer choice. The UK should just do away with silly no shopping on Sundays at large stores because you really should be in church laws.
- gsnedders 9y ago
  > The UK should just do away with silly no shopping on Sundays at large stores because you really should be in church laws. *England (and Wales) and Northern Ireland At least as far as English law goes, every time this comes up there's typically enough opposition about people having time with family (and having a day off coincide). I don't remember any discussion about church in decades. Of course, the discourse in Northern Ireland may differ.
  - wil421 9y ago
    > people having time with family In the US, this is code for day off for church. Chick-fail-a is a fast food restaurant that uses this same reasoning for closing Sunday. The company is widely known to have Christian values. It was only a few years ago that my state, Georgia, allowed alcohol to be bought in stores on Sunday. They still only allow it after 12:30, church gets out at 12:15.
    - fusiongyro 9y ago
      We have the same law here in New Mexico. No booze can be sold at a store until after noon on Sundays.
    - planteen 9y ago
      The general word for these laws are blue laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law I live in Colorado and bizarrely buying cars on Sunday is prohibited. One "nice" thing about this law is you can go walk a car lot on a Sunday without getting bugged by sales people.
      - amyjess 9y ago
        > I live in Colorado and bizarrely buying cars on Sunday is prohibited. IIRC, Texas has a weird law where car dealers can be open on either Saturday or Sunday but not both.
        ghaff 9y ago
        In addition to church, one of the drivers of regulations around weekend closures is small businesses. The idea is that larger businesses can be open whenever it's profitable to hire people to work. Whereas many small businesses effectively require the owner to be present. Not arguing for that position but I've heard the argument around opening on Sunday. It's been a big shift in much of the US. In Massachusetts, almost nothing was open when I was in school and Sunday retail alcohol sales are a relatively recent thing. And there are still very weird alcohol-related laws in some towns.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  I was surprised to read about those laws still being on the books in the UK, thought it was stupid in the US when most people haven't regularly gone to church on Sunday in a while.
  - cavanasm 9y ago
    There are similar laws on the books in some localities in the US still. Example: No retail alcohol sales on Sundays in Indiana. However, restaurants can still serve. At this point, it's a boon to generally slow Sunday restaurant sales, and businesses don't seem to want it changed, even if it irritates consumers.
    - mitchty 9y ago
      They FINALLY got rid of the no alcohol sales on Sunday here in Minnesota literally a few months ago. Been on the books since statehood, finally enough people got sick of the crap and got the stupid liquor seller lobby told off by telling our representatives we'd not vote for them anymore if they continued to do the stupid no sunday sales crap. http://www.startribune.com/a-minnesota-first-liquor-stores-are-legally-open-on-a-sunday/432119993/ http://www.startribune.com/a-minnesota-first-liquor-stores-a... Sunday selling laws in general are stupid.
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Hoorah, now we can be drunk all week without having to plan anything in advance! Would be interested to see if it (will) affected alcohol related disease, deaths, rehab, etc.. I imagine a day of enforced sobriety - because you were too drunk all week to plan ahead - might actually have been a great help for some??
        orangecat 9y ago
        I imagine a day of enforced sobriety - because you were too drunk all week to plan ahead - might actually have been a great help for some?? Yes, in the same sense that you can probably find someone who is better off because of the government's policy of randomly ruining the lives of pot smokers.
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  > Mingy little versions of supermarkets represent a contraction of consumer choice. But it is based on consumer behaviour, not some nefarious choice reduction agenda. Large scale weekly shops are in decline. Shoppers have been buying smaller orders more frequently. You can't expect them to stock 10 types of butter for you to choose from and throw the other 9 away. Even if they had enough storage space to accommodate your choice demands, local residents do not enjoy huge trucks at all times of day and night so they are restricted to certain hours of operation for delivery. Small frequent order shopping is something retailers would rather not have to cater for at all.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I'd rather see them closed on Sunday and I'm not religious.
- jotm 9y ago
  Where is that? Asda and Aldi near me are open on Sundays till 4pm... As opposed to Germany and Belgium, where only gas stations are open and everything is overpriced as a result.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  On the other hand a greater number of mini supermarkets means at any given time you're closer to a supermarket. Maybe even in walking distance. Choice vs convenience, car culture vs walking & biking.
- willewonte 9y ago
  I don't think the Bible requires that you be in church, it merely says 'keep the Sabbath day holy', or something like that. True spiritual laws are less like political legislation and more like scientific laws in that they're not arbitrary or coercive. From a secular perspective one could say: being busy 7 days a week is like drinking 7 days a week, or going with little sleep for 7 nights: you're going to make sub-optimal decisions. (Which you will regret and which will give you more work as a result.)
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  The UK has done away with such laws in favour of "opinion polls show people like Sunday trading, Christmas closures and such". Pretty sure all the supermarkets in my small UK city open 7 days a week??
- bluedino 9y ago
  Most stores are 24 hours, 7 days a week in the USA and only close on December 25th
roymurdock 9y ago
Summary: Supermarkets open and close based on profit per square foot. Therefore they close in poor neighborhoods and stack up 3 or 4 deep in wealthy neighborhoods. The author calls for some type of regulation on supermarkets or "the control of food supply". For example rules that chain stores provide evidence they are appropriate for the income level of the neighborhood, as in San Francisco. "Until then, the food supply of UK cities – and the character of our neighbourhoods – will be subject only to the law of which supermarket locations are most profitable per square foot." This is related to the "food desert" phenomenon cropping up in the US. Haven't heard much being done on this front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
- nostromo 9y ago
  The food desert theory has largely been dismissed as a cause for poor eating, and are rather the result of consumer choices. http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/10/26/if-you-build-it-they-wont-come-why-eliminating-food-deserts-wont-close-the-nutrition-gap/ http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/10/26/if-you-build-it-th... > For low income and education households, the most publicized reason that people eat poorly is that they do not have access to healthier options. Media coverage of efforts to combat nutritional disparities has focused primarily on efforts by grocers like Whole Foods to open stores in underserved neighborhoods. However, according to the study by Schnell et al., policy initiatives focusing on increasing access to nutritious food will only solve a small portion of these nutritional differences. Controlling for income level, the study finds that differences in access only explain 10 percent of disparities in consumption across education groups. > Furthermore, the study finds that households do not strongly respond to the entry of new stores into their geographic area, even though they are aware of the addition of new stores. When households change the mix of stores they visit once a new store is introduced, the researchers do not observe a lasting change in the nutritional value of their purchases.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    I always get a chuckle about people saying area in cities are food deserts. A food desert is somewhere you can't get delivery, tacos from a taco truck, or a pizza from anywhere but a convenience store. Nunavut is a food desert. Pickle Lake is a food desert. I live in a food desert. If it is ten blocks to a Safeway, it's not a food desert. If you can call and get delivery from three different types of ethnic food, it's not a food desert. Even where I live, 25 miles from a grocery store, there are all sorts of choices. I have a whole wilderness full of game and have pretty much finished harvesting my garden. I've been in cities around the globe, and the only ones I've seen that are worthy of the title are hugely impoverished and probably not far from a war zone. I have seen poor people in cities who can't afford much food, however.
tr352 9y ago
I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention Hotelling's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law), which is a well known economic principle that explains exactly this phenomenon.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  I like to encourage people to provide more information about a link. From the referred Wikipedia article: Suppose that there are two competing shops located along the length of a street running north and south, with customers spread equally along the street. Each shop owner wants to locate his shop such that he maximises his own market share by drawing the largest number of customers. In this example, the shop itself is the 'product' considered and both products are equal in quality and price. There is no difference in product to the customers. Therefore, each customer will always choose the nearest shop because there is no difference in product or price. Another example of the law in action or practice is to think of two food pushcarts at a beach. Assume one starts at the south end of the beach and one starts at the north. Again assuming a rational consumer and equal distribution along the beach, each cart will get 50% of the customers, divided along an invisible line equidistant from the carts. But, each cart owner will be tempted to push his cart slightly towards the other, in order to move the invisible line so that it encompasses more than 50% of the beach. Eventually, the pushcart operators end up next to each other in the center of the beach.
lr4444lr 9y ago
My grandfather was in the grocery business. No mention of shoplifting rates, vandalism, and the concomitant cost of insurance? We're not having an honest conversation.
- roymurdock 9y ago
  It's a good point but it's encapsulated in "profit per square foot" - author is talking about both revenue and the costs you mentioned.
- mnglkhn2 9y ago
  Maybe that’s why the government should provide this service?!
k__ 9y ago
We had a tiny Lidl store for years, but suddenly the Lidl corporation changed their minimal size for stores and closed it. Took half a year till a non-profit opened at the place. They give jobs to disabled people, but are quite expensive compared to the Lidl. Well, guess I got gentrified :D But it's shocking to see that even in one of the biggest cities in Germany there are places where big corps won't sell. A few kilometers away is a street with 4 super markets in 1min walking distance from each other...
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > But it's shocking to see that even in one of the biggest cities in Germany there are places where big corps won't sell. A few kilometers away is a street with 4 super markets in 1min walking distance from each other... I recall in Frankfurt Ost there was a Nahkauf (Rewe Group) not 300m away from an actual Rewe, which considering they're the same company I consider kind of silly. After some time they decided to close the Nahkauf, and now the location is empty. Or in train stations where there are 2 or 3 different Starbucks selling coffee. Maybe they do this so they can capture the rush hour traffic, and the rest of the day they have reduced staff? Never made sense to me to have them so close together.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    > Never made sense to me to have them so close together. If there's multiple entrances/exits to the station, you want a Starbucks to be every direction a person might choose to go, so they don't have to go out of their way to go to a Starbucks - the whole point of Starbucks is that it's more convenient to hop into one than to find a better coffee place.
    - k__ 9y ago
      But what about 2 super markets from the same chain 100m apart? I mean, I can understand that the city wants a few competitors in the street, but the same store?
      - 9y ago
pkamb 9y ago
Seattle has a number of large grocery stores built in, I believe, the mid-90s. Single story, no attached retail storefronts, and a big parking lot. Suburban "strip mall" buildings but in the middle of reasonably dense neighborhoods. (15th/John Safeway, 15th QFC, 15th Walgreens, etc.) Today they'd be built as 5+ story housing + grocery store + 10 retail spots + underground parking. I've always wondered about the math of a store like that. Why aren't they being turned, like every other single-story building in Seattle, into modern mixed-use development? I'd like to see it happen to these stores. No problems with historic listings or beloved architecture. Is bringing the store down for a year or two the primary hurdle?
- pchristensen 9y ago
  As long as the store is profitable and either owns the land or has a long-term lease (the two most common models), there's no rush to redevelop them. They're in the grocery business, not land speculation or complex development.
- thinkythought 9y ago
  I know in some areas a large part of this has been neighborhood opposition to development/NIMBY stuff. For example a bunch of projects in Roosevelt, including i believe one to redo the old QFC just off 65th were held up in asinine arguments for years about how this kind of smart development would "ruin the character of the neighborhood" and such. I remember this being an issue with the rebuild of the Wallingford store as well, and probably others. The only developments like this really going through that aren't just brand new builds where no store previously existed are for example, the 23rd ave Safeway, and the old Red Apple(which are fraught with their own gentrification issues). Basically, it only really happens in POC or lower income neighborhoods where there isn't super dedicated opposition, or where it will just be ignored. I do know for a fact that some stores, like the brooklyn ave Safeway, and the two broadway QFCs basically barely make enough money after theft to stay open, which might contribute to this. At least the latter two have retail/other businesses within the structure, and the thomas st store has some apartments as well in the back section...
  - 9y ago
Noos 9y ago
What's not stated is that "profitable" is still incredibly low. Supermarkets often have an average margin of 1-3% unless they go the pricey organic/health route, and it's natural they would seek every advantage to remain profitable. They simply don't have as much leeway as other types of businesses to support underperforming locations, even potentially. Regulation won't work at all. It just would wind up reducing the amount of stores overall, not force retailers to service poor neighborhoods. The only ones that will price for the added risk organically and are "last resort" retailers (bodegas), or are dollar store type chains, which generally sell substandard product but at high enough margins to endure for a time. Not much can be done. You can't legislate away numbers.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  If you absolutely need a grocery store in a poor area that isn't sustainable, you can form a co-op and then use government subsidies to prop it up. We subsidize all sorts of "unprofitable" services that have a societal ROI (libraries anyone?), no reason we shouldn't do it for grocery stores where a for-profit entity can't make it work.
  - Noos 9y ago
    I don't think it would be possible to the scale needed. Well, not without burdening already overburdened local economies. A library is one per town or even region, and even they aren't really doing that hot despite being subsidized. Trying to support a multitude of co-ops (and managing them to make sure they actually are sustainable and survivable businesses) would seem to be a nightmare. I don't really know what the solution is. But it's not something like racism or ignoring untapped markets, where it can be solved by regulation.
    - jlg23 9y ago
      > Trying to support a multitude of co-ops (and managing them to make sure they actually are sustainable and survivable businesses) would seem to be a nightmare. On the contrary, the moment you create a big scheme like that all the large supermarket chains will queue up. With all the mandatory paper trail we already generate for every action involved, it boils down to.. exactly what supermarket chains are doing: * Central instance for management and purchases (the latter being optional for the "subsidized co-op"-model) * resale to quasi-independent sub-entities ("supermarket" or "co-op"). * Individual stores of chains all use the same software already; for the co-cop scenario that could translate to a FOSS-offer (hard requirement being: however you do it, legal accounting principles apply). I don't see a nightmare here, just a shift of terms and a slightly more flexible ERP configuration.
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wink 9y ago
> Brutal competition from discounters Aldi and Lidl is making life very uncomfortable for the big British grocers I don't really get this paragraph. On a recent vacation in Scotland I found Tesco to not be very top-end (that's also how I remember it from the 90s) - so unlike Sainsbury it feels like a pretty low-end supermarket (or maybe mixed? full-spectrum) and we have some of these "nearly discounter" chains in Germany as well. FTR, I only visited Lidl once in Scotland, so can't comment. And I also didn't really buy typical groceries, not cooking,e tc. Just random stuff. TLDR: I'm very confused about which chain is supposed to be upscale or close to being labelled a discounter. Also, in Munich I tend to see a lot more normal supermarkets anywhere near the city center than exactly Aldi and Lidl, because they tend to have bigger stores, which are not so easy to come by.
Chiba-City 9y ago
Cities are neighborhood places where people walk to work and carry groceries home 4 nights a week. It works great for retirees who ditch their cars entirely. I live near the National Zoo in DC. We have a local Iranian grocer right off Metro with a local organic chain right next door. There is no parking there. Segregate any "venue" with parking vs. the alternatives. I also hit a nearby Whole Foods for some items but they need giant underground parking lots for their business models. The notion that "everyone" is living on Taco Bell and delivery pizza is pure nonsense. Our DC ethiopian and hispanic communities blossoming a short walk away eat really well. They have nice markets where I sometimes buy jicama to pickle. Some C++ template fu nerds also cook up a healthy storm. Recipes and idioms apply everywhere.
ggm 9y ago
Most peoples experiential sense of shopping is now informed by postwar expectations. If more people alive today had experienced price controls and rationing, I suspect their feelings about food would be different. I did not experience rationing, I have only a sense of "food" as a product of supermarkets existing, and their effect on the food supply chain. I was at the tail-end of -grocer as a term of art for people who intermediated food. Watching green- grocers go out of business in parallel with active choices to eat seasonal food it is easy to make a syllogism "supermarkets destroy choice" or "supermarkets make people eat worse" but its nothing like that simple. Its cause/effect/correlation against a number of other things like the role of sugar in diet, carbohydrates, prices of agricultural inputs, mega farming, industrialization.. Yes, we see shops close everywhere. Yes, we see supermarkets concentrate in high income areas. Yes, regulation is a nightmare but deregulation is also a nightmare. I don't know the answer either. Locavore is expensive.

93 points by Mz 9y ago

gxs 9y ago

Interesting. A quick search in the bay area seems to confirm, at least to some extent, the article's findings. https://imgur.com/a/PwABV https://imgur.com/a/PwABV I searched the east bay for Safeways. Rockridge, Piedmont, Montclair, Alameda (all better off areas): check, check, and check. If you see the area south of downtown Oakland all the way down to almost San Leandro is completely devoid of all Safeways. In my experience of driving through those areas, they are mostly served by discount stores like FoodMax, Food4less, or other ethnic stores. No real point here other than I checked what the article said and it seems to jive with reality.

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Macsenour 9y ago
As I'm local to you, I'll add that a Nob Hill Foods is in Alameda, a higher rent location, with a Foodmax on the Oakland side.

OscarTheGrinch 9y ago

Mingy little versions of supermarkets represent a contraction of consumer choice. The UK should just do away with silly no shopping on Sundays at large stores because you really should be in church laws.

gsnedders 9y ago
> The UK should just do away with silly no shopping on Sundays at large stores because you really should be in church laws. *England (and Wales) and Northern Ireland At least as far as English law goes, every time this comes up there's typically enough opposition about people having time with family (and having a day off coincide). I don't remember any discussion about church in decades. Of course, the discourse in Northern Ireland may differ.
- wil421 9y ago
  > people having time with family In the US, this is code for day off for church. Chick-fail-a is a fast food restaurant that uses this same reasoning for closing Sunday. The company is widely known to have Christian values. It was only a few years ago that my state, Georgia, allowed alcohol to be bought in stores on Sunday. They still only allow it after 12:30, church gets out at 12:15.
  - fusiongyro 9y ago
    We have the same law here in New Mexico. No booze can be sold at a store until after noon on Sundays.
  - planteen 9y ago
    The general word for these laws are blue laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law I live in Colorado and bizarrely buying cars on Sunday is prohibited. One "nice" thing about this law is you can go walk a car lot on a Sunday without getting bugged by sales people.
    - amyjess 9y ago
      > I live in Colorado and bizarrely buying cars on Sunday is prohibited. IIRC, Texas has a weird law where car dealers can be open on either Saturday or Sunday but not both.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        In addition to church, one of the drivers of regulations around weekend closures is small businesses. The idea is that larger businesses can be open whenever it's profitable to hire people to work. Whereas many small businesses effectively require the owner to be present. Not arguing for that position but I've heard the argument around opening on Sunday. It's been a big shift in much of the US. In Massachusetts, almost nothing was open when I was in school and Sunday retail alcohol sales are a relatively recent thing. And there are still very weird alcohol-related laws in some towns.
stevenwoo 9y ago
I was surprised to read about those laws still being on the books in the UK, thought it was stupid in the US when most people haven't regularly gone to church on Sunday in a while.
- cavanasm 9y ago
  There are similar laws on the books in some localities in the US still. Example: No retail alcohol sales on Sundays in Indiana. However, restaurants can still serve. At this point, it's a boon to generally slow Sunday restaurant sales, and businesses don't seem to want it changed, even if it irritates consumers.
  - mitchty 9y ago
    They FINALLY got rid of the no alcohol sales on Sunday here in Minnesota literally a few months ago. Been on the books since statehood, finally enough people got sick of the crap and got the stupid liquor seller lobby told off by telling our representatives we'd not vote for them anymore if they continued to do the stupid no sunday sales crap. http://www.startribune.com/a-minnesota-first-liquor-stores-are-legally-open-on-a-sunday/432119993/ http://www.startribune.com/a-minnesota-first-liquor-stores-a... Sunday selling laws in general are stupid.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Hoorah, now we can be drunk all week without having to plan anything in advance! Would be interested to see if it (will) affected alcohol related disease, deaths, rehab, etc.. I imagine a day of enforced sobriety - because you were too drunk all week to plan ahead - might actually have been a great help for some??
      - orangecat 9y ago
        I imagine a day of enforced sobriety - because you were too drunk all week to plan ahead - might actually have been a great help for some?? Yes, in the same sense that you can probably find someone who is better off because of the government's policy of randomly ruining the lives of pot smokers.
PeachPlum 9y ago
> Mingy little versions of supermarkets represent a contraction of consumer choice. But it is based on consumer behaviour, not some nefarious choice reduction agenda. Large scale weekly shops are in decline. Shoppers have been buying smaller orders more frequently. You can't expect them to stock 10 types of butter for you to choose from and throw the other 9 away. Even if they had enough storage space to accommodate your choice demands, local residents do not enjoy huge trucks at all times of day and night so they are restricted to certain hours of operation for delivery. Small frequent order shopping is something retailers would rather not have to cater for at all.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
I'd rather see them closed on Sunday and I'm not religious.
jotm 9y ago
Where is that? Asda and Aldi near me are open on Sundays till 4pm... As opposed to Germany and Belgium, where only gas stations are open and everything is overpriced as a result.
sliverstorm 9y ago
On the other hand a greater number of mini supermarkets means at any given time you're closer to a supermarket. Maybe even in walking distance. Choice vs convenience, car culture vs walking & biking.
willewonte 9y ago
I don't think the Bible requires that you be in church, it merely says 'keep the Sabbath day holy', or something like that. True spiritual laws are less like political legislation and more like scientific laws in that they're not arbitrary or coercive. From a secular perspective one could say: being busy 7 days a week is like drinking 7 days a week, or going with little sleep for 7 nights: you're going to make sub-optimal decisions. (Which you will regret and which will give you more work as a result.)
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
The UK has done away with such laws in favour of "opinion polls show people like Sunday trading, Christmas closures and such". Pretty sure all the supermarkets in my small UK city open 7 days a week??
bluedino 9y ago
Most stores are 24 hours, 7 days a week in the USA and only close on December 25th

roymurdock 9y ago

Summary: Supermarkets open and close based on profit per square foot. Therefore they close in poor neighborhoods and stack up 3 or 4 deep in wealthy neighborhoods. The author calls for some type of regulation on supermarkets or "the control of food supply". For example rules that chain stores provide evidence they are appropriate for the income level of the neighborhood, as in San Francisco. "Until then, the food supply of UK cities – and the character of our neighbourhoods – will be subject only to the law of which supermarket locations are most profitable per square foot." This is related to the "food desert" phenomenon cropping up in the US. Haven't heard much being done on this front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

nostromo 9y ago
The food desert theory has largely been dismissed as a cause for poor eating, and are rather the result of consumer choices. http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/10/26/if-you-build-it-they-wont-come-why-eliminating-food-deserts-wont-close-the-nutrition-gap/ http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/10/26/if-you-build-it-th... > For low income and education households, the most publicized reason that people eat poorly is that they do not have access to healthier options. Media coverage of efforts to combat nutritional disparities has focused primarily on efforts by grocers like Whole Foods to open stores in underserved neighborhoods. However, according to the study by Schnell et al., policy initiatives focusing on increasing access to nutritious food will only solve a small portion of these nutritional differences. Controlling for income level, the study finds that differences in access only explain 10 percent of disparities in consumption across education groups. > Furthermore, the study finds that households do not strongly respond to the entry of new stores into their geographic area, even though they are aware of the addition of new stores. When households change the mix of stores they visit once a new store is introduced, the researchers do not observe a lasting change in the nutritional value of their purchases.
- KGIII 9y ago
  I always get a chuckle about people saying area in cities are food deserts. A food desert is somewhere you can't get delivery, tacos from a taco truck, or a pizza from anywhere but a convenience store. Nunavut is a food desert. Pickle Lake is a food desert. I live in a food desert. If it is ten blocks to a Safeway, it's not a food desert. If you can call and get delivery from three different types of ethnic food, it's not a food desert. Even where I live, 25 miles from a grocery store, there are all sorts of choices. I have a whole wilderness full of game and have pretty much finished harvesting my garden. I've been in cities around the globe, and the only ones I've seen that are worthy of the title are hugely impoverished and probably not far from a war zone. I have seen poor people in cities who can't afford much food, however.

tr352 9y ago

I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention Hotelling's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law), which is a well known economic principle that explains exactly this phenomenon.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
I like to encourage people to provide more information about a link. From the referred Wikipedia article: Suppose that there are two competing shops located along the length of a street running north and south, with customers spread equally along the street. Each shop owner wants to locate his shop such that he maximises his own market share by drawing the largest number of customers. In this example, the shop itself is the 'product' considered and both products are equal in quality and price. There is no difference in product to the customers. Therefore, each customer will always choose the nearest shop because there is no difference in product or price. Another example of the law in action or practice is to think of two food pushcarts at a beach. Assume one starts at the south end of the beach and one starts at the north. Again assuming a rational consumer and equal distribution along the beach, each cart will get 50% of the customers, divided along an invisible line equidistant from the carts. But, each cart owner will be tempted to push his cart slightly towards the other, in order to move the invisible line so that it encompasses more than 50% of the beach. Eventually, the pushcart operators end up next to each other in the center of the beach.

lr4444lr 9y ago

My grandfather was in the grocery business. No mention of shoplifting rates, vandalism, and the concomitant cost of insurance? We're not having an honest conversation.

roymurdock 9y ago
It's a good point but it's encapsulated in "profit per square foot" - author is talking about both revenue and the costs you mentioned.
mnglkhn2 9y ago
Maybe that’s why the government should provide this service?!

k__ 9y ago

We had a tiny Lidl store for years, but suddenly the Lidl corporation changed their minimal size for stores and closed it. Took half a year till a non-profit opened at the place. They give jobs to disabled people, but are quite expensive compared to the Lidl. Well, guess I got gentrified :D But it's shocking to see that even in one of the biggest cities in Germany there are places where big corps won't sell. A few kilometers away is a street with 4 super markets in 1min walking distance from each other...

kogepathic 9y ago
> But it's shocking to see that even in one of the biggest cities in Germany there are places where big corps won't sell. A few kilometers away is a street with 4 super markets in 1min walking distance from each other... I recall in Frankfurt Ost there was a Nahkauf (Rewe Group) not 300m away from an actual Rewe, which considering they're the same company I consider kind of silly. After some time they decided to close the Nahkauf, and now the location is empty. Or in train stations where there are 2 or 3 different Starbucks selling coffee. Maybe they do this so they can capture the rush hour traffic, and the rest of the day they have reduced staff? Never made sense to me to have them so close together.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  > Never made sense to me to have them so close together. If there's multiple entrances/exits to the station, you want a Starbucks to be every direction a person might choose to go, so they don't have to go out of their way to go to a Starbucks - the whole point of Starbucks is that it's more convenient to hop into one than to find a better coffee place.
  - k__ 9y ago
    But what about 2 super markets from the same chain 100m apart? I mean, I can understand that the city wants a few competitors in the street, but the same store?
    - 9y ago

pkamb 9y ago

Seattle has a number of large grocery stores built in, I believe, the mid-90s. Single story, no attached retail storefronts, and a big parking lot. Suburban "strip mall" buildings but in the middle of reasonably dense neighborhoods. (15th/John Safeway, 15th QFC, 15th Walgreens, etc.) Today they'd be built as 5+ story housing + grocery store + 10 retail spots + underground parking. I've always wondered about the math of a store like that. Why aren't they being turned, like every other single-story building in Seattle, into modern mixed-use development? I'd like to see it happen to these stores. No problems with historic listings or beloved architecture. Is bringing the store down for a year or two the primary hurdle?

pchristensen 9y ago
As long as the store is profitable and either owns the land or has a long-term lease (the two most common models), there's no rush to redevelop them. They're in the grocery business, not land speculation or complex development.
thinkythought 9y ago
I know in some areas a large part of this has been neighborhood opposition to development/NIMBY stuff. For example a bunch of projects in Roosevelt, including i believe one to redo the old QFC just off 65th were held up in asinine arguments for years about how this kind of smart development would "ruin the character of the neighborhood" and such. I remember this being an issue with the rebuild of the Wallingford store as well, and probably others. The only developments like this really going through that aren't just brand new builds where no store previously existed are for example, the 23rd ave Safeway, and the old Red Apple(which are fraught with their own gentrification issues). Basically, it only really happens in POC or lower income neighborhoods where there isn't super dedicated opposition, or where it will just be ignored. I do know for a fact that some stores, like the brooklyn ave Safeway, and the two broadway QFCs basically barely make enough money after theft to stay open, which might contribute to this. At least the latter two have retail/other businesses within the structure, and the thomas st store has some apartments as well in the back section...
- 9y ago

Noos 9y ago

What's not stated is that "profitable" is still incredibly low. Supermarkets often have an average margin of 1-3% unless they go the pricey organic/health route, and it's natural they would seek every advantage to remain profitable. They simply don't have as much leeway as other types of businesses to support underperforming locations, even potentially. Regulation won't work at all. It just would wind up reducing the amount of stores overall, not force retailers to service poor neighborhoods. The only ones that will price for the added risk organically and are "last resort" retailers (bodegas), or are dollar store type chains, which generally sell substandard product but at high enough margins to endure for a time. Not much can be done. You can't legislate away numbers.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
If you absolutely need a grocery store in a poor area that isn't sustainable, you can form a co-op and then use government subsidies to prop it up. We subsidize all sorts of "unprofitable" services that have a societal ROI (libraries anyone?), no reason we shouldn't do it for grocery stores where a for-profit entity can't make it work.
- Noos 9y ago
  I don't think it would be possible to the scale needed. Well, not without burdening already overburdened local economies. A library is one per town or even region, and even they aren't really doing that hot despite being subsidized. Trying to support a multitude of co-ops (and managing them to make sure they actually are sustainable and survivable businesses) would seem to be a nightmare. I don't really know what the solution is. But it's not something like racism or ignoring untapped markets, where it can be solved by regulation.
  - jlg23 9y ago
    > Trying to support a multitude of co-ops (and managing them to make sure they actually are sustainable and survivable businesses) would seem to be a nightmare. On the contrary, the moment you create a big scheme like that all the large supermarket chains will queue up. With all the mandatory paper trail we already generate for every action involved, it boils down to.. exactly what supermarket chains are doing: * Central instance for management and purchases (the latter being optional for the "subsidized co-op"-model) * resale to quasi-independent sub-entities ("supermarket" or "co-op"). * Individual stores of chains all use the same software already; for the co-cop scenario that could translate to a FOSS-offer (hard requirement being: however you do it, legal accounting principles apply). I don't see a nightmare here, just a shift of terms and a slightly more flexible ERP configuration.

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wink 9y ago

> Brutal competition from discounters Aldi and Lidl is making life very uncomfortable for the big British grocers I don't really get this paragraph. On a recent vacation in Scotland I found Tesco to not be very top-end (that's also how I remember it from the 90s) - so unlike Sainsbury it feels like a pretty low-end supermarket (or maybe mixed? full-spectrum) and we have some of these "nearly discounter" chains in Germany as well. FTR, I only visited Lidl once in Scotland, so can't comment. And I also didn't really buy typical groceries, not cooking,e tc. Just random stuff. TLDR: I'm very confused about which chain is supposed to be upscale or close to being labelled a discounter. Also, in Munich I tend to see a lot more normal supermarkets anywhere near the city center than exactly Aldi and Lidl, because they tend to have bigger stores, which are not so easy to come by.

Chiba-City 9y ago

Cities are neighborhood places where people walk to work and carry groceries home 4 nights a week. It works great for retirees who ditch their cars entirely. I live near the National Zoo in DC. We have a local Iranian grocer right off Metro with a local organic chain right next door. There is no parking there. Segregate any "venue" with parking vs. the alternatives. I also hit a nearby Whole Foods for some items but they need giant underground parking lots for their business models. The notion that "everyone" is living on Taco Bell and delivery pizza is pure nonsense. Our DC ethiopian and hispanic communities blossoming a short walk away eat really well. They have nice markets where I sometimes buy jicama to pickle. Some C++ template fu nerds also cook up a healthy storm. Recipes and idioms apply everywhere.

ggm 9y ago

Most peoples experiential sense of shopping is now informed by postwar expectations. If more people alive today had experienced price controls and rationing, I suspect their feelings about food would be different. I did not experience rationing, I have only a sense of "food" as a product of supermarkets existing, and their effect on the food supply chain. I was at the tail-end of -grocer as a term of art for people who intermediated food. Watching green- grocers go out of business in parallel with active choices to eat seasonal food it is easy to make a syllogism "supermarkets destroy choice" or "supermarkets make people eat worse" but its nothing like that simple. Its cause/effect/correlation against a number of other things like the role of sugar in diet, carbohydrates, prices of agricultural inputs, mega farming, industrialization.. Yes, we see shops close everywhere. Yes, we see supermarkets concentrate in high income areas. Yes, regulation is a nightmare but deregulation is also a nightmare. I don't know the answer either. Locavore is expensive.