Nijya Market has a number of good Japanese grocery stores in the SF bay area. They're rather expensive, like Whole Foods. Noted for fresh fish and sushi. Also, they have the good Pocky, from Japan, not the made-in-Thailand stuff. Their stores are small supermarkets, with carts and parking.
SF's Chinatown is stuck in the 1950s. Where are the black-glass buildings, the fast forward fashion from Beijing, the automated stores, and the latest parts from Shenzhen? They're in Cupertino, home of Apple, which is 67% Asian and has entire malls of good Asian stores. The big mall across the street from the Apple mothership is a good place to start.
I fee like this is a bit of weird "Othering" but dressed up in some weird sense of correctness.
Respectfully, you may be overthinking it. If you take it at face value, this is simply a business designing their retail experience with new customers in mind.
This isn't a "political correctness" thing. People new to serious comic book stores, stone and gravel retailers, etc. can easily feel overwhelmed and a bit lost in the same way.
Ok I can feel cramped. Where or how does cultural intrusion enter the picture?
Is that like trying to sit with the jocks at the lunch table in high school and they look at you weird like you’re intruding their culture?
I grew up as the child of east European immigrants, and growing up we’d always had our own stores to buy food from the homeland. They’re gone, for the most part, but I can walk into most Russian grocery stores and get what I want, but I don’t understand most of the Russian options. Asking about some of the foods can lead to a strained or confusing conversation.
They don't look at you weird. You just feel it.
My analogy would be wearing shoes inside a house when they typically don't wear.
Imagine being a foreign tourist to America, going into a middle-American Wal-Mart — one far away from places where any tourists would ever bother to visit. Some American dudebro wandering through the aisle asks you a question (in English), and then gets pissed off when they realize that you don't speak English, and starts berating you and wondering out loud what his town is coming to.
The social-anxiety expectation for the experience of shopping in a small neighbourhood ethnic grocery store, is the projected reverse of that: the shoppers there seeing you there bumbling about, unable to pronounce any of the names of the items, and responding by wondering angrily in $language what their district-of-the-town is coming to, i.e. when their nice little ethnic enclave community got so gentrified/whitewashed that "people like that" started showing up.
(Despite being white, it's the racist American dudebro part of this that I've experienced before, second-hand, while taking my (non-white) partner on a trip to show them a more-rural area I used to live in. That was an experience I don't want to repeat.)
I usually get treated as a funny curiosity in Thai and Indian stores. The feeling of being intrusive or in the way is self imposed. I don’t get annoyed at Asian people in Western stores either.
Why would they? English doesn't have a legally protected status.
Some local jurisdictions do require translations on signs. The City of Doraville in metro Atlanta has a high Asian population and stores are required to have an English translation for their signs.