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I loved living around the corner from a small grocery store. It made it possible to pick up ingredients and fresh vegetables for dinner on the walk home from th

I loved living around the corner from a small grocery store. It made it possible to pick up ingredients and fresh vegetables for dinner on the walk home from the train or when taking the dog for a walk with my wife. It was a bit more expensive, but that was offset by the fact that buying only what you need for the next couple of days leads to less spoilage and waste. Overall, our food budget has remained about the same since we had to move away. Where I live now, it takes 15-20 minutes to drive to the grocery store, so it's only practical to shop once per week. Shopping is a big chore and a fight with traffic, not a nice walk. It means I need to dedicate more of my apartment to food storage and more of my time to meal planning. It's certainly not an efficiency gain for me personally. On the plus side, the large store does have 73 different flavors of potato chips.

IanCal 2y ago
How centralised the logistics are doesn't seem to me to be all that related to the size and number of the shops. For example, here there's Tesco. But there's huge tescos, tiny ones in towns, tiny ones outside of towns, subsidiary companies like onestop that exclusively are smaller shops (we tend to call them "corner shops" here). If anything, a larger central logistics "engine" behind it should make it much easier to pop up a new shop somewhere as most of the issues are solved and there's experience in doing it. It does however make things more boring.