Of course, all problems in NA urbanism seem to stem from land zoning. Building a small grocery store in a residential neighborhood is illegal in a distressingly huge percentage of urban land here, and it's been this way since the 50s. So that's probably part of why the megamart has succeeded. The concept of 'mixed use' is a new idea to many cities, and it's not well distributed on the zoning maps.
Hence Costco/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy/Staples/etc succeed over a small business that might be a walkable distance. You are already in the car going to and from work, what difference does a detour make.
The rest of your comment, however, I fully agree with.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-issues-standard-mileage-rat...
> The standard mileage rate for business use is based on an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile.
I also incorporate morbidity/mortality risks associated with driving, considering it is the riskiest thing people do on a day to day basis which very well could result in loss of income due to not being able to work and other costs.
I also expect inflation to keep driving up replacement cost of cars (and repairs).
Finally, I am under the impression that short distance start and stop driving is more costly via wear and tear than long distance highway driving.
...and all of it is from three different companies?
As a result, the different people have very diverse diets, and it is unlikely that a small store would satisfy most of them.
For example, each week I shop from 2-3 different supermarkets that are 60k ft^2 each (6k m^2).
This is one of the reasons I enjoy shopping at ALDI. When I want honey, I pickup the one and only container of honey and move on.
Shopping takes 1/4 of the time and requires no decision making other than reading a list I made earlier, so it's literally like a relaxing stroll.
You don't have at least forest honey and meadow honey? That seems rough.
Note that <100 years ago basically every US city had somewhat similar density to New York or Boston. It’s not that they were built for the car so much as they were rebuilt for it. So I don’t think the reason can be as simple as ‘because they’re older’.
Most American cities were designed to do everything by car.
And before anyone mentions people going to work that need the highway, majority of commuting to downtown business is not cars, but a combo of transit + cycling + walking.
In some parallel universe Boston is yukking it up with a high frequency train from Roxbury to the South End (along the original elevated Orange line route) to South Station to Seaport to the Airport and I hate them for it. I just know they demolished Central Parking at Logan and built a gleaming rail terminal in its place.
Though I shouldn't complain too much. Not that I go into the city a lot but the public transit system, including commuter rail, is pretty good by US standards overall for all its problems.
And parking at Logan is such a mess that I just get driven, expensive as it is. Even economy parking is expensive and it's practically in another state.
It's a reasonable question but I don't really know the answer.
In the US you tend to have sort of a bifurcation between (a few) supermarket chains (possibly somewhat downscaled in an urban environment) and convenience stores/bodegas/small food departments in places like urban Targets that tend to have minimal produce etc. Whereas in someplace like London, you're have Tesco's and smaller Sainsbury's which are somewhat in-between. Certainly there are exceptions with various local markets/specialists but that's the general pattern one sees.
For example, I live in Seattle, in a single family house in a single family house neighborhood. I have 3 large supermarkets within 5 minute drives, and at least 6 within 10 minutes.
Given that, why would I want to go to a store that has smaller selection and higher prices, if I can get to a proper one in 5 minutes?
I've lived most of my life in places that are 5-10 minutes by car from a store, and it makes for a very isolated social experience, but also it means that if I don't have a car, getting groceries is a planned 1.5 hour experience.
Now that I'm living within walking distance, I buy a majority of my food multiple times per week, only for a few days at a time, which means I can also go to the coffee shop and see people doing the same thing, have a talk with them, socialize etc..
>Given that, why would I want to go to a store that has smaller selection and higher prices, if I can get to a proper one in 5 minutes?
Because you might not have a car.
The Lively & Liveable Neighbourhoods that are Illegal in Most of North America (Not Just Bikes channel) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
I have a local grocery store that I can walk to in 5 min but I’m not paying double for food when the alternative is to drive 10 min.
It's generally a bit more expensive than the larger one that was already in the area but damn is it nice. I've noticed this in a bunch of other neighborhoods, too. They have stuff like European import candies and stuff. They didn't exist about a decade ago when I was living here last.
You will find smaller supermarkets (publix, trader joes, etc.) within 5-10 mins of driving time in a lot of cities.
and what about within 5-10 minutes of walking time? I think that's what was meant in the GP comment.
In the UK, the trade-off you described does not exist. Unless you live in a genuine rural area, there is almost always a supermarket (or mini version of a supermarket chain) within a 10 minute walking distance of where you live. Even in suburban areas. And they aren't overpriced, I've never noticed a significant difference in pricing between the mini versions of e.g. Tesco and the big versions.
I live in the suburban outskirts of a medium-sized city, there are about half a dozen decently sized food shops in a ten minute walking radius of my house.
From what I've seen, this is purely because of zoning laws. You can't walk to buy milk in American suburbia because it's illegal to build retail in residential areas. It's that simple.
America is vast and sparse for the most part. I don't know if such a model is even viable even if you were to relax zoning for grocery stores. Isn't the store's profitability proportional to population density ? Considering the real estate and labour costs, you would have to incentivise the grocery stores quite a bit to achieve that sort of store/ditance ratio.
And yes, it would be viable. For one thing, the zoning laws are what is keeping the local population density low in the first place, so the problem is circular. There are huge tracts of land where you can only build single detached houses with minimum lot sizes. Let people build duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings. Allow for subdivisions. This gives the customer base for amenities.
(When I say this, often the first reply is: but people want single family homes! Well yes, I'm not denying they are popular, but that's no reason to mandate them. The status quo enshrines one set of people's preferences in law while forbidding all alternatives. You can't really gauge true preferences in the presence of such huge market distortions. At any rate, single family homes still exist in places without zoning to mandate them, so they are available to people who want them. And moreover, you can have single family housing without forbidding retail.)
I grew up in a suburb of a town that was dying twice over (from collapsed manufacturing and collapsed tourism, the two big employers in the old days). Most housing was semi-detached, what you call duplex housing. Within 10 minutes walking distance of my house, there were three off-licences, a Co-Op, two butchers, two pubs, a post office, a library, and a chip shop. So, lets say we halve the population density by making the houses single detached instead of semi-detached. All else equal, that would let them support about half the retail, so that would be (rounding down) one off-licence, a smaller Co-Op with a post office branch inside, one butcher, and one pub. A wealthier town would likely have even more.
So yes, it's completely workable, both in theory and from my own experience.
When I talk about this it puts me in mind of a Cold War westerner trying to explain how grocery stores work to an eastern bloc denizen. Yes, ordinary people can afford bananas!
Zoning is a kind of Soviet-style central planning mania that has somehow grown like a tumor inside the world's biggest free market democracy. It distorts markets and mindsets.
In a tight grid (like where I grew in Chile), a small store can survive off the foot traffic of a few square kilometer of houses, because they're more connected and just more fit in the space.
Back when these places existed, they were terrible leaches on poor people. High prices, almost rotten meat and produce and etc. Desperate oasises in the "food desert". Many cities had a social program to clear land to build full service groceries and box stores in transit dependent areas.
The modern versions are pricey stories for wealthy urban professionals.
However, this is less-common in the more central areas of Vancouver, at least where I live, and I could never go back. If you drop into street view and go up and down Commercial Drive, there's 5-10 grocery stores that are easy to walk to. This absolutely isn't the case in most of the suburbs though.
We do have "convenience stores" some of which are effectively very small grocery stores (produce, fresh meats, etc). But usually significantly more expensive.
Or you can get the 1.5 lbs of chicken breasts (boneless) for $7.
Of course I’m actually only a block from a normal grocery store so I don’t need to worry.
Independent stores sometimes are better, sometimes worse.
Of course NYC-style bodegas are a completely different thing, but you don't see that outside of the biggest and densest cities.
My wife & I walk or bike to them quite regularly in the spring/summer/fall.
Maybe we’ll leapfrog that step straight to Amazon Fresh delivery to the door.
But I always wonder why don't you have more smaller supermarkets closer to where people lives, instead of larger ones that require so long trips. I guess it wouldn't make it walkable, because cities are not designed like that, but it would be a 5 minute trip maybe.
In my mind that is probably more efficient. People may come more often, so more opportunities for cross selling, real state is probably cheaper and the only downside I see is that would probably require more labor.
If I had to hop in the car for doing anything I think I'll die of laziness.