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I find it really fascinating how small local decisions like how many square feet a store can be, influence what kind of companies form, and thus, how good your

I find it really fascinating how small local decisions like how many square feet a store can be, influence what kind of companies form, and thus, how good your local breweries, cafes, bookstores, restaurants, groceries are. Like they hint at in the article, I guess small store footprints make it not worth large "faceless" corporations opening shop and therefore the stores that do pop up are run out of more passion for the thing (some, at least). Traveling in EU a bunch, I was always interested why in Italy, for example, small restaurants are on every residential block run by essentially mom and pops, and still surviving, serving up reasonably good food. Versus this kind of restaurant has largely been displaced (if not number, at least in consciousness) in any of our US large cities by corporate backed entities. Versus if your zoning allows big box 100,000 sq ft stores, you're just by nature going to get something a little more bland.

bsder 7y ago
> Traveling in EU a bunch, I was always interested why in Italy, for example, small restaurants are on every residential block run by essentially mom and pops, and still surviving, serving up reasonably good food. Versus this kind of restaurant has largely been displaced (if not number, at least in consciousness) in any of our US large cities by corporate backed entities. Population density. Thinking about one of the restaurants I was in in Paris, it had seats for about 40 people (tightly packed!) and remained filled for about 4 hours and we turned about every 2 hours. So, about 80-100 people a night roughly 6 nights a week. So, call it 400 people per week being dinner customers of that restaurant to keep it alive. That's roughly 200 apartments or houses nearby needed to keep that restaurant alive. You don't need many of those restaurants before you exceed the local suburban density in the US. In Paris, that's probably exceeded by the number of people on a couple blocks.

bsder 7y ago

> Traveling in EU a bunch, I was always interested why in Italy, for example, small restaurants are on every residential block run by essentially mom and pops, and still surviving, serving up reasonably good food. Versus this kind of restaurant has largely been displaced (if not number, at least in consciousness) in any of our US large cities by corporate backed entities. Population density. Thinking about one of the restaurants I was in in Paris, it had seats for about 40 people (tightly packed!) and remained filled for about 4 hours and we turned about every 2 hours. So, about 80-100 people a night roughly 6 nights a week. So, call it 400 people per week being dinner customers of that restaurant to keep it alive. That's roughly 200 apartments or houses nearby needed to keep that restaurant alive. You don't need many of those restaurants before you exceed the local suburban density in the US. In Paris, that's probably exceeded by the number of people on a couple blocks.