Northern Virginia has seen this with food trucks. Since late 2020, I'm starting to see food trucks posting up in the evenings in various residential neighborhoods (almost like how ice cream trucks trawl the streets in summer). This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago -- not worth it for the truck owner. But now they're moving to where people are, which is the upper-middle-class neighborhoods where everyone still WFH. Incredible to see a line for dinner at a food truck parked in the middle of a residential summer street in the suburbs.

All this to say: there are ways to keep evolving how things are usually done.

Where are these trucks? I’m in Reston, but I imagine the trucks are mostly clustering in Falls Church or Arlington? All I can think of is there’s sometimes a food-truck-event at the local park-and-ride, usually on the weekend, but it doesn’t seem very consistent.

Presumably if you had bagel shops in every residential neighbourhood, each would sell less and have largely the same fixed costs and so prices would have to be higher.

Possibly, but I imagine they could get by with less square footage, and in a less expensive space, so rent would be substantially less. But, yeah, oven and other cooking apparatus is probably the same regardless of scale (up to whatever size starts requiring duplicates).

And from a societal perspective, saving on commute time/expenses but with $15 bagels is still better than wasting 2+ hours/day, additional car expensises, and only a $7 bagel.

You forgot labor.

A huge bagel store will use humans more efficiently than a small one.

One big problem with "lots of shops" is that they require lots of retail workers, workers who spend much of their paid time not working. Prices reflect that.

It's unclear to me why urbanists think that wasting humans on retail is so important.

Stuff at small stores costs more money than stuff at big stores. As you point out, labor efficiency is one of the reasons, but there are others too. Regular people know this very well. The “urbanists” active in HN threads are typically well-off enough that they don’t care about whether their grocery bill is $50 or $60. That’s good for them, but expecting everyone else to follow suit is rather out of touch.

Correct, but where's all that trillion dollar commercial real estate going ?

Cities don't have much of a reason to exist, at least not in their current form, with WFH.

> Cities don't have much of a reason to exist, at least not in their current form, with WFH.

Are you assuming people would rather live in suburbs and countryside then? I would definitely still live in the city, and my first thought of offices closing was "great, more space for residential buildings".

Not everyone, but you'd have less of a reason to consolidate so many people in a relatively small space.

It's much much cheaper to live outside of major cities. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, office buildings are a massive source of tax revenue for cities.

This is the entire reason you have this push to bring everyone back.

>> Cities don't have much of a reason to exist...

Ideally, people should be able to live where they want to. If that is in a city, great, otherwise they can live elsewhere and work from home. I don't see any great benefit in forcing people to live where they do not want to be.