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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

Article has a confusing title, it not about saving your small local neighborhood store. It is about how supermarkets can compete with Amazon, Walmart and online. His idea sounds a lot like Whole Foods, and not a neighborhood store.

The store that resulted is called Harvest Market, which opened in 2016. It’s south of downtown Champaign, Illinois, out by the car dealerships and strip malls; 58,000 square feet of floor space mostly housed inside a huge, high-ceilinged glass barn.

Harvest Market is the anti-Amazon. It’s designed to excel at what e-commerce can’t do: convene people over the mouth-watering appeal of prize ingredients and freshly prepared food.

Since Amazon is Whole Foods, it doesn't sound at all like the anti-Amazon.

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It sounds like Kelly is trying to position his stores as "warm and fuzzy", with a "Mom's Kitchen" section, rather than "opulent", like Whole Foods. “When did you start to mistake opulence for success?”, he says.

Now consider Trader Joe's. They have modest sized stores. They're rather plain. They offer mostly their own house brands. They don't have sales, coupons, delivery, or affinity cards. The prices are reasonable. The quality is OK. Dwell time is low; you can be in and out of a Trader Joe's in ten minutes. Checkouts go fast, partly because they don't have coupons or affinity cards to slow things down.

Whole Foods is chasing the top 10%. Trader Joe's is chasing the top 50%. Dollar General has the bottom 25%.

Personally, I tend to do most of my shopping at a regional bulk/budget chain. For produce, I tend to hit up the farmer's market and the neighborhood grocery store (I buy produce on an as-needed basis rather than as part of my scheduled shopping).

Whole Foods is too expensive and unpleasant, Walmart is too unpleasant, and Trader Joe's is too variable in terms of quality -- some of their stuff is great, some of it is awful, and it's hard to tell which by looking.

Exactly. I like the idea of "traditional American supermarket" for the irony content.

When I was a youngin', our town didn't have any chain stores, just a dozen or so family markets.

I miss the culture and environment, not so much the lack of selection. Since then, it's hard to take sides in a Safeway vs Walmart vs Amazon brawl.

The first chain fast food (aside from the ubiquitous Dairy Queen) came somewhat later. That's a thing I think we could do without.

Having shopped at family markets, I also don't miss their prices.

I don't remember them being particularly expensive (although they were never "budget" stores), but their quality was always above average and they were active members of the neighborhood rather than just stores that sold stuff.

I do miss their higher quality and usually locally sourced products... and the friendly "customer experience" of local employees paid above minimum wage.

Your family market experience was clearly very different from mine. High quality, local sourcing, and friendly services were never hallmarks.

> When I was a youngin', our town didn't have any chain stores, just a dozen or so family markets.

Me too. I truly miss those days, and make it a point to shop at the few remaining such markets in my town.

The article addresses that: Whole Foods literally contracted the same people between 2003 and 2007. These stores are like Whole Foods in part because they're designed by the same people.

They also mention Niemann's relationship with the Whole Foods CEO pre-sale, and how Niemann didn't believe WF was doing enough to lower prices. Then the recession hit and Whole Foods nearly went out of business.

The anti-amazon part isn't in the design (as already said, the design predates the Amazon acquisition); its in the supermarket's direct relationship with local suppliers.

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