Sri Lanka chiming in: this was the case when I was growing up. Two corner stores within 50 meters of my home. Personal relationship with both owners (they set aside my favourite paper, advised me on razors when I started shaving). Now that has been lost with supermarkets. It's all very convenient with a lot of choice, but something has been lost. Something experiential that can't be boiled down to KPIs.

In the Netherlands this still exists, but mostly in the form of shops "from foreign people". So you have some Turkish stores, a Bengal store, a Polish store, an Afro-Carribean store. They are often run by one person or a family. The customers know where to find these stores without advertising.

Recently, in my town at least, there are a few larger Turkish supermarkets. I don't see the smaller shops take a hit yet, not sure if things will change.

I think on the contrary. Some Turkish and Egyptian small grocery stores in the Dutch town I live in sell better quality meat and vegetables than most chain supermarkets, for a lower price often.

> model should be adopted elsewhere too, the opposite of going hyperscale

So you are saying there were no grocery stores in the US before Piggly Wiggly opened up?

It was the model that preceded the current one throughout the western world. It clearly failed because it couldn’t compete with the efficiency (and much better customer experience and prices) provided by supermarkets.

It wouldn’t work without imposing some artificial limitations (as is the case in quite a few European cities) which have a significant productivity cost.

Last place I lived in the US still had corner markets (in the 1990s), because the neighbourhood predated cars.

OTOH I once worked in a city there that was younger than I was, and it was a disaster: nothing but drives to franchise "concepts", and had there been anyplace to walk to, there weren't even any sidewalks.

Now I live in a village dating to the 14th century, and don't even need to walk to the store, let alone drive: my groceries get delivered to my doorstep.

As far as I'm concerned, the traditional "supermarket" model is one in which the customer is used as an ersatz employee: you do your own delivery driving, you do your own stock picking, and these days you even do your own checkout scanning.

At first thought I'd see this in similar ways, with the exception of anything that is (or should be) fresh, like fruits, vegetables, meat & fish/sea-fruits.

How is your delivery experience with those?

At second thought I'd miss the haptics/olfactorics of smelling/tasting new kinds(or so far unknown to me) of cheeses, or the general discoverability of other items in store, like soaps, deodorants, shower-gels, shaving-stuff, etc.

Searching and ordering these online is a bad substitute for me.

At third thought all of this delivery-hype should be shunned, because it's just cementing in a class of low-wage workers, ready to be exploited, for the fucking convenience of all the the tasteless assholes giving a shit about such things.

Fruits and veggies are fresh[0]. We don't cook meat & fish ourselves. Refrigerated stuff comes in a special cold bag with ice; frozen stuff comes in a special box with insulation and dry ice.

We're old, so discovery is not a big issue — we explore other things; weekly shopping is much more about exploitation[1]. (being able to start from last week's baseline online is a big win over manual shopping, and to some degree we get exploration anyway, as the store always adds in freebies of items they'd like us to try)

Finally, we're not in an anglophone country, so delivery (and removal of the special containers afterwards) is done by a combination of (a) the postal service, (b) transport companies, and (c) employees of the store. All covered by at least union-negotiated baselines; all with insurance and much more than 2 weeks paid vacation; all paid decently[2]. No "independent contractors".

[0] if we cared more, we'd get them at the Friday farmers' market.

[1] we are eating to live, not living to eat

[2] just looked it up: transport employees are USD ~60k/yr, postal carriers ~67k/yr, so the store is probably in that range.

> we're not in an anglophone country, so delivery

I’m not sure not having those things is at all unique to Anglophone countries

I would gladly take small, diverse stores who sell local products over big supermarket chains. Unfortunately, in most big cities in EU this is not an option, anymore.

Mom and pop grocery stores hardly ever sell different products from the supermarket. They will have less product diversity, higher prices and less fresh stock of perishables (vegetables, etc).

They work out best if they specialise in less in-demand items, like asian stores or fruit stores (where freshness of produce is their sole goal). But at the same time these simply can't exist every few blocks or so by the nature of being specialised.

>Mom and pop grocery stores hardly ever sell different products from the supermarket

That might depend upon your locale.

I guess it depends whether supermarkets exist in that locale. Since they could never compete selling the same type of products

Except the user in the comment above is describing stores which sell the same products as supermarkets just at higher prices and less inventory.

> small, diverse stores who sell local products over big supermarket chains. Unfortunately, in most big cities in EU

I guess it depends but where I am more upscale areas are full of such shops. Even right next to large supermarkets. They do fine because they offer niche/specialized products at much higher prices, to people who are willing to pay X times more for grass feed ultra organic beef raised in a “small farm” with the deceased cow’s former exact former address on the packaging than for factory processed anonymous beef imported from some “inferior” country..

However while superficially these might seem similar to family owned corner grocery in economically less developed countries they are almost nothing alike.

Oh lookie Sophie! Now we are having a piece of Kuhnigunde, doesn't she taste real beefy? Yum!

I live near Green Lanes in London. Have a massive Sainsbury's (supermarket, nudging hypermarket as sells clothes), an Aldi, and then all up Green Lanes is a never ending stream of grocers in various med flavours (Turkish, Italian, Cypriot etc). It's chaotic, but I love being able to get anything I want from nice people any time. Only sad bit is the good Butcher closed (English style. There's still at least 4 Turkish ones, but they don't do pork, sausages, fancy aged steak etc.).

This model also means using of lots and lots of labor because sales volume of those shops is very small and it keeps entire family occupied. It means those people are unavailable for other productive activities.

The world is entering labor shortage zone that will last for as long as we don't figure how to fix reproduction without abandoning human rights (which isn't an option anyway because there are many countries and people can vote with their feet).

Economic models that are as efficient as possible and above all, labor efficient, are thus highly preferrable. It's very likely we will see totally unmanned chain convenience stores soon.

Countries have a labor shortage while simultaneously having overemployment with people doing pointless jobs, or people desperately searching for jobs and hundreds of people applying to the same positions. People who "graduate" from working at a grocery store and putting money in their own pockets often end up sitting at a computer doing nothing but scrolling through the internet and putting money in their employer's pockets.

Corner grocery stores aren't really a problem.

The real question is not whether they are a problem but why such wildly inefficient systems exist, and the answer is likely a factor in the desperation.

Funny how it is claimed simultaneously that we enter labor shortage zone and there not being any meaningful jobs for people to do.

> The world is entering labor shortage zone

Labor for what? Labelling training data?

You’re being downvoted because you’re right and HNs user base hates to hear the truth.