How Convenient are Supercenters?

Further thoughts on big-box stores and urbanism

I received this really interesting comment on a recent piece here about the history of the supercenter, i.e. a discount department store and supermarket under one roof. (That was my newsletter follow-up to an original piece in The Bulwark, here.)

This is the comment (very lightly edited):

Is there a way that urbanism can accommodate the convenience of the supercenters, and other big-box stores? You recently had a post about box stores with rooftop parking [this may not have been me], and likewise one of the themes of your blog is a debate on whether urbanism or sprawl is more convenient, and I’m generally sympathetic to your view.

But the convenience of going to Target or Walmart is a strong counter, in my mind. Neighborhood grocery stores, drug stores, convenience stores, restaurants, even urgent cares—absolutely. But the supercenter seems predicated on space, seems like it needs a parking lot, and also I have a hard time visualizing it working in a smaller, neighborhood context.

There are a few things I could say. It’s a very important question, and one that urbanists and critics of suburban sprawl have to be able to convincingly answer.

“Walk to the store” or “take transit” or “shop locally” should not be like “eat your vegetables.” We will not browbeat people into behaving the “right way” out of a sense of obligation or abstraction. These things should be pleasant. They should be competitive options on the merits.

I think a lot of critics of urbanism/walkability/etc. think that what we’re saying is, essentially, “eat your vegetables”—that we agree with them that these things are inferior and inconvenient, and that we simply want to make their lives more inconvenient. For the vast majority of urbanists, it is the exact opposite. We believe these options have been artificially rendered inferior, by bad policy, and we want to restore the competitiveness and convenience of alternatives to driving everywhere/big-box retail, etc.

Now—there’s no reason why a box store can’t be in an urban setting—look at the old urban department stores, over a century ago! You could certainly fit a modern supercenter in that kind of footprint. There are also smaller-format versions of big-box stores designed for urban settings, perhaps most notably Target.

While modern big-box retail is mostly a suburban/car-dependent phenomenon, I don’t think it inherently has to be. The economics are still different from an independent/locally owned store—the scale of the business is unchanged in terms of its suppliers and its relationship to the local community—but its physical scale can be made consonant with an urban environment.

Another thing to consider or reappraise is just how convenient these supercenters actually are. Store size is not an unalloyed good. It’s kind of like the fact that at a zero-percent tax rate and a 100-percent tax rate alike, you raise no revenue. There’s a rate at which revenue is maximized. Similarly, there’s a size at which a big-box store is probably optimally convenient, after which extra space and inventory isn’t really adding convenience.

I know a fellow who lives out in West Virginia and doesn’t like dense urban living. But he doesn’t terribly care for big-box stores either. He points out that stores like a Walmart Supercenter have gotten so big that their size is a kind of inconvenience itself—there’s no more running in and grabbing something real quick. It becomes a bit of a slog or chore to go there.

In fact—if you superimposed a Walmart Supercenter over a small town—it’s pretty much as big as a real Main Street or small downtown! Think about it: you park far away; you walk to the store; you walk between departments, often back and forth; you often wait on line. The convenience is to some extent an illusion, because it’s all in one property and under one roof.

After going out shopping, often at just two or three large stores, I’m often surprised by how many steps my phone says I’ve taken. It’s kind of like how 10 minutes in the car to go somewhere barely registers as time, even though that’s a 20-minute round trip. You can walk around a whole lot at Walmart and not perceive that you have done so, and you can burn a half-hour in the car and not perceive it as time. The ways in which the suburban development pattern distort our perception is one of the most interesting things about it, to me.

There’s one more thing I could say, which I said I wouldn’t. Maybe we do need to “eat our vegetables,” in a sense. There’s the whole question of the subsidy that these huge suburban businesses receive, directly and indirectly. The folks at Strong Towns have demonstrated that unit of land for unit of land, an urban pattern generates far more revenue than a suburban one.

The cost of that pattern is hidden but we do, and will, pay it. The sense in which we must “eat our vegetables” here is that the apparent conveniences of the suburban development pattern are a sort of “junk food.” It isn’t good for us, or our cities, or our finances. Its benefits are exaggerated and its costs are hidden. That convenience exists, but it is fundamentally artificial.

That is an argument that might influence planners and civic leaders to do things differently. But it’s not an argument that will move the vast majority of people. In the meantime, what do you think?

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Related Reading:

The Supermarket Downstairs

Forty Pages, No Words

The Transition is the Hard Part

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