Main Street Supermarket

The forms of traditional urbanism and the scale at which business is done are inextricably linked

I’ve done a lot of writing here and elsewhere on the subject of small-scale commerce and “trade areas”—basically, the geographic reach of a store. Before I say more I’ll link some pieces that touch on various aspects of this.

Here and here, I wrote about the largely Vietnamese Eden Center strip plaza in Northern Virginia, which boasts well over 100 businesses despite being constructed for many fewer than that. How did they manage that? Several old storefronts have been gutted and rebuilt as tiny indoor malls, with interior hallways and lots of very small vendors and small shops. The typically oversized parking lot for the strip plaza is often filled to capacity—not because it’s too small but because Eden Center manages to be one of the few shopping centers productive enough to draw that much traffic on a regular basis.

Here, I wrote about driving down two New Jersey highways: NJ 28, an older route which follows one of New Jersey’s commuter rail lines into New York, and U.S. 22, one of America’s earliest neon-lit wastelands (I say that with deep affection.) In that piece, I said of the development pattern along the U.S. 22 corridor:

The trade areas of these large stores and shopping centers are meant to be large, meaning that while they certainly serve locals, they are not neighborhood businesses; the parking requirements are meant to be overly generous; and the highway itself is designed for fast driving. This is not a scale or a built environment that is particularly conducive to thriving small businesses or close-knit communities.

Here, I wrote about small-town hotels, and the hyperlocal scale of business in those days, when each little town had its own small but (often) robust economic ecosystem. I wrote of my hometown:

Flemington—whose local politics for the last 15 years have been the poster child for NIMBYism—was once a tiny city proud of its few square blocks of elegant urbanity. Flemingtonians were people who lived and lodged downtown, rode trains around the region, and walked from their house on a street grid or their downtown second-floor apartment to buy groceries. Yet now they frequently view such things as suspect or as a threat to the character of their community. What happened? Well, maybe scale.

And in that same piece I conveniently referenced yet another piece touching on scale and trade area, this time regarding modern urban-style/mixed-use developments:

I touched on trade areas in my most recent piece here, where I documented a visit to a couple of mixed-use developments in Virginia, out at the edge of the Washington, DC, metro area. These two developments had supermarkets, meant to serve the residents of the adjacent homes. However, because they were supermarkets—not neighborhood-scaled grocery stores—they both ended up going out of business. Why? The area could not support multiple full-size supermarkets. Those mixed-use developments had tried to replicate the appearance of a neighborhood, and they got the basic building blocks right, but they got the scale wrong. And, given trends in retail and economics, we quite often get the scale wrong.

Finally I had a piece, which I never fully discussed here, on the small-town supermarkets that once existed all over Hunterdon County (of which Flemington is the county seat.)

Some background:

Flemington once had a number of grocery stores and small food markets, and at the dawn of the suburban era, it had three bona fide supermarkets. These were not old-fashioned counter-service grocery stores, but what we would today call “small-format supermarkets” or “neighborhood supermarkets.” Generally 8,000–10,000 square feet, they had most of the features that still define the supermarket as a retail concept. Supermarkets like this still exist in some towns and urban neighborhoods, and Aldi or Trader Joe’s today are not very far off. But unlike today, such supermarkets were once ubiquitous in small towns like Flemington.

The trajectory of the town’s three midcentury supermarkets is instructive, and it’s a microcosm of how the suburban experiment subtly altered small towns, turning them from tiny cities into suburban lifestyle accouterments.

TLDR: they all moved to the edge of town, then either went out of business or left the city limits for bigger, newer stores in the neighboring township. Individually, along with their whole industry, they underwent centralization and a huge increase in scale.

I think, in all these pieces, I’ve been driving at a single point that until now I have not quite had the words for. The most striking insight all of this work has clarified for me is that the forms of traditional urbanism and the scale at which business is done are inextricably linked.

Now that might sound sort of obvious: of course classic Main Streets were conducive to small businesses, and big-box suburbia is less conducive to it. And some people think it’s a distinction without a difference—that classical urbanism is commerce and human activity at a small scale. Maybe that’s right, but I’ve rarely seen it put so straightforwardly. The real insight, I think, is that what people like me call “urbanism” is not entirely, and perhaps not even mostly, a question of land use per se.

I’ve talked about this before in relation to other retail stories—Target closing some of its newish, mixed-use anchor locations, for example—but the way that these old downtown supermarkets illustrate in miniature exactly what happened to retail and the broader small-town economies of old is really striking.

Now these erstwhile businesses in Flemington I’m talking about are not grocery stores with barrels and shelves behind a counter and clerks pulling down merchandise. These were basically fully modern supermarkets, just in a smaller footprint. I was surprised to learn that modern supermarkets were still opening in old downtowns as late as the 1960s. For a brief period, these two things coexisted. Is it possible for them coexist again?

This bit is interesting:

Flemington’s old Acme/ShopRite building, after many years as a ceramics and housewares store, has been vacant for several years now. The town would like to see a supermarket there once again. The likely younger residents who will live in the town’s upcoming apartments will be living right on Main Street. They will most likely have intentionally chosen that location, and will enjoy at least some of the classic small-town ways.

However, wanting it isn’t enough. The town’s previous mayor told me that no supermarket was interested in operating in an old Main Street building with a tight parking lot. The business itself has changed, even apart from consumer preferences. And the mere change of preferences the other way may not be sufficient to bring back the old way of doing business. Because “urbanism” is or was something deeper than that, and trickier to reverse-engineer.

I noted in the quoted chunk above that Aldi and Trader Joe’s resemble the old neighborhood supermarket format. So does Lidl. Lidl and Aldi are German companies. Trader Joe’s is owned by (though not particularly tightly managed by) a branch of the Aldi company, separate from the one that operates the U.S. Aldi stores.

In other words, this retail concept just about went extinct in the United States, and was reintroduced much later by the German companies—which were viewed as modern and quite divergent from traditional grocery retailing in their home country. It’s an interesting story.

If the Main Street supermarket reemerges in the United States, it will be through, or influenced by, a totally different lineage than that carried on by the American companies that cheerfully vacated Main Street 60 years ago.

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Related Reading:

There’s a Small Hotel

A City’s a City No Matter How Small

The Rest of the Country

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