musings on grocery/corner stores

[mindstalk]

Prompted by this article on America's missing corner stores and this video on Dutch grocery shopping.

Apart from a few weeks of contract work in Redwood Shores, and a week in the countryside outside Amsterdam, I think I've lived my entire life within a 20 minute walk of a supermarket, and usually a fair bit closer than that. Not by coincidence, I plan my residences with that in mind. This also means I haven't gone to corner stores much; why bother, when a cheaper supermarket is 5-10 minutes away? Still, sometimes, especially expanding to some specialty neighborhood stores:

Childhood: one corner store or another for the Sunday newspaper, and I think to pick up a gallon of milk when that was the only thing wanted. Also a "Fruit and Produce" stand we sometimes used, I wasn't told why: presumably better selection, freshness, or prices.

Pasadena: supermarket was 15 minutes away, so I started getting milk from a corner store in between; a bit more expensive, but saved my scrawny arms from having to haul milk 15 minutes on top of everything else I was getting.

Cambridge/Somerville: there was a meat market in Davis Square which I think I would visit sometimes even from Porter Square, and definitely when I was living in Powderhouse Square. Fair variety and definitely cheaper (for meat; they sold other things, often at a markup.) In Porter I lived between two Star Markets (super), but Powderhouse was interesting as Davis long didn't have *any* nearby supermarket -- closest was Porter Square! But Powderhouse is 10 minutes in the wrong direction, so the closest had been a 19 minute walk to a distant market. Except that a Bfresh opened in Davis like right before I moved there. It was odd, but enough of a supermarket to work.

Osaka: memory is vague, but I think I sometimes used the closer conbini for bread (the cheap white stuff, not a favorite but stopgap calories or late night snack) and milk. Maybe; I definitely have memories of getting milk from the supermarket too, not like I was getting gallons for my tiny fridge. Conbini also had prepared hot foods. The market was an 8 minute walk away but somehow it *felt* further.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Annoyed Envy. One nice thing about Oslo was accessibility of groceries (<five mins to a supermarket and to a train-station that took me to other shops); here it's very suburban wasteland. Nearest supermarket would be ... 20-25 minutes on foot one way and that's the limit of things within walking distance. I don't make that trip; lugging groceries up the hill is enough of a pain when it's tacked on to another trip I'm making. So grocery-purchasing is like, one trip every 3-4 weeks when I can get a lift from a family member with a car and then some amount of buying stuff to take home after club meetings. It's a particular issue that I have to buy things which are fine with sitting in my bag through the meeting (since it ends after closing) and thus I don't get to eat very much fresh meat, and most of the meals I eat are constricted by what's lying around after I've eaten through stuff I bought a month ago. ...I think a corner store might technically exist on the main road but like, if you're going to walk for 20 mins to get to the main road, you may as well go somewhere else?

[mindstalk]

My sympathies.

Your profile says you're in Australia? My 3 months there weren't bad but I wasn't too far from city centers.

Brisbane 1: like 5-10 minute BRT from center; super a 3 minute walk away.

Brisbane 2: a bit south of center; super 10 minute walk, though with some really annoying traffic lights in between. WTF Brisbane, light cycles should not be 2+ minutes.

Brisbane 3: up on Kangaroo Point, I forget the distance but not far, more annoying traffic lights.

Brisbane 4: I think in between 2 and 3. Don't actually have a clear memory.

My friends own rural acres a decent drive from Helensvale station. Lots of groceries *at* the station but you're not walking anywhere from where they live.

Sydney: <10 minute walk both places (west of Bondi, then west just beyond the "trains start skipping stations" point). Also I checked a bunch of train (subway) stations on Google Maps and most seemed to have 2+ groceries near the station.

Hobart: this one was actually annoying, I think, though I don't have a strong sense of the distance. Some really steep hills.

Melbourne 1: Walkable SW of center. yeah, like 5-10 minutes.

Melbourne 2: Walkable S of center. No clear memory; might have been a bit further and annoying.

[contrarianarchon]

Yeah I think this is much more distinctly a "city center" vs. "outer suburbs" thing, not a regional variation thing. I suspect nearly everywhere is better than where I live, even in this city. Price of being right up where the city developed into the edge of a national park.

[squirrelitude]

A few years back a small corner grocery called Neighborhood Produce opened up in central Somerville, and that's where we get most of our groceries now, a bike load at a time. (We actually get a lot of stuff in bulk or cases at this point -- lentils and flour and peanut butter and whatnot.) One of the owners has a background in food insecurity (food pantries, some other things) and specifically picked the location because it was a little bit of a food desert. They've opened up a second, larger location in Ball Square and are planning on having a bunch of these tiny groceries. I think it's a lovely model.

[mindstalk]

Nice! Good luck to them.

[prixmium]

I live in a place where Food City and Walmart are really the only options if you want groceries. There's one Asian grocery I know of but have never been. I've seen a few Mexican tiendas (sp?) but the ones in my town have never lasted as far as I know.

I could probably walk to Walmart or Food City within a half an hour but especially with Walmart it'd be primarily walking in a thin half-defined bike lane on the edge of a busy highway.

A lot of America is literally designed to make it necessary or desirable to travel by car and only by car.