A City Writ Small

A final exploration of neighborhood supermarkets and small-scale commerce

I’ve done a lot of writing lately about neighborhood supermarkets—the sorts of smaller, more tightly packed supermarkets that used to fill out small towns, urban neighborhoods, and early suburbs. You can read my two earlier pieces here and here.

I’ve observed that while mainstream American grocery chains have largely supersized, suburbanized, and left the small-format grocery store segment behind, that segment survives in immigrant-owned independent small groceries and in the German imports Aldi and Lidl. Meaning, it’s still possible to do grocery retailing in this format.

In yet another piece that I have in Resident Urbanist—check them out and sign up, it’s a cool new web publication exploring practical, applied urbanism, and I’m a board member and regular writer there!—I looked more closely at some small grocery stores in Northern Virginia, and asked what it would take to bring this segment back in a big way.

I’m careful to specify that I’m not writing against big-box stores or large supermarkets—I’m rather arguing that these stores leave a market segment empty. The scale at which a typical chain supermarket operates today is physically and financially incompatible with a walkable setting, with it being nestled into a Main Street or a modern mixed-use development. I think about the question of convenience, and how that can mean many different things:

Neighborhood supermarkets are also convenient because their smaller footprints and parking lots mean they’re less imposing to walk to, less time consuming to park at, and quicker to run in for one or two items. We might think of size and selection as convenience, but a store with tens of thousands of items and 50,000 (or 100,000 or more, in the case of a supercenter store) square feet is not scaled to the quick, frequent errand run. These are different kinds of efficiencies or conveniences. Huge stores concentrate and centralize shopping runs in the same way they concentrate economic activity and concentrate the physical locations where it is possible to buy things. We are largely missing a whole other category of conveniences that come from physically smaller, financially more nimble, and geographically more distributed stores.

But I want to focus in even more detail on one particular, really fascinating phenomenon I’ve observed. It looks like, generally, the smaller a store is by square footage, the more densely packed its interior tends to be. In other words, the less overall space you have, the more efficiently you use that space. As supermarkets have become larger over time, they’ve become less “dense.” Like a miniature version of what’s happened with our land use.

So I want to show you a series of photos of supermarket aisles I’ve taken, and illustrate this progression.

Here is a recent, but very old-fashioned supermarket—with a full set of departments, including meat and fish—at only about 5,000 or 6,000 square feet. It’s in an older strip mall in a space that was originally a small five-and-dime/variety store. I’m using a screenshot of a Google review for this one because it’s a bit of a drive just to snap a photo:

Here is Bestway, a Latino supermarket of about 20,000 square feet in an old A&P from the mid-1960s:

Here is a Giant from the 1980s, at about 35,000 square feet:

Here is a Stop & Shop (originally Finast/Edwards) built around the year 2000, at about 50,000 square feet:

That’s about as wide as aisles get—roughly eight or nine floor tiles wide versus four-six in older stores. But the general sense of open space in newer stores is larger too. Here’s a Sprouts, a smaller but modern supermarket whose interior resembles a Wegmans, Harris Teeter, or other large modern supermarket:

And for a non-supermarket example, look at this small-town old-school hardware store in Lambertville, New Jersey:

This is kind of how my mother remembers her local neighborhood supermarket growing up in New York City, a tightly packed Key Food.

When you walk around a new store versus an old store, you just get a sense of expanse, openness, unused space. There’s also less of an aisle organization in a lot of them, with more things laid out on the sales floor at angles, in different shapes, in smaller islands, etc.

It’s almost like the shift from a street grid to a winding system of streets. Come to think of it, an aisle-centric organization is a street grid in miniature. And the “cars”—shopping carts—have grown in size as the “streets”—aisles and interior corridors—have gotten wider.

Spooky.

What is this? You see it with car size, house size, road and street width. You see it with the sizes of discount department stores and supermarkets. And you see it with the width of the aisles inside those stores. It’s almost like some piece of code being executed—some law of nature or human psychology manifesting itself in all these different ways. Is it simply that we use as much space as we feel we’re able to afford? Affluence = embiggening? Is it a kind of dark matter, the dead, unproductive space that a total reliance on the automobile for everyday mobility demands of the built environment?

From my Resident Urbanist piece:

As the square footage gets smaller, the aisles become narrower. Narrow aisles mean more stuff per unit of area. This is like a tiny microcosm of an old Main Street, versus a modern suburban shopping center. An old-fashioned store runs on the same principles as an old-fashioned city. The aisles in a lot of modern supermarkets are often twice as wide as the aisles in these older stores!

Strong Towns emphasizes the concept of revenue or productivity per acre in comparing urban and suburban areas, finding old-fashioned urbanism to generate far more revenue per unit of land area than the suburban pattern. This is not true just at the level of the block or the shopping center—the acre—but it is true down to the level of the aisle inside the store—the square foot! In many ways, suburban land use and commerce are about the increasingly less efficient use of more and more space.

“In many ways, suburban land use and commerce are about the increasingly less efficient use of more and more space” is a line I’ll probably be using a lot.

This is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen in all of my urbanism and urbanism-adjacent reading, writing, and looking around. The answer to this is as likely to come from psychology as it is from land use. I don’t know exactly what it all means. But wow.

If you can, tell me more.

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Related Reading:

The Supermarket Downstairs

Keep On Trucking

Born This (Urbanist) Way

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