Average distance to a supermarket in Amsterdam is 400 meter or 1300 feet
oozo.nl
oozo.nl
I'm from Zurich, Switzerland. I don't own a car because everything I need is either in walking/cycling distance or reachable by public transport. While I've been well aware of the car dependency situation in North America, watching a few episodes from the mentioned YouTube channel, made me realize that this is a self-inflicted problem because of car centric zoning and development rules. The often cited "greater distances" are in fact the result of these, not the cause.
I mean like I live in the Romanian suburb and it's not great, but supermarkets everywhere and walkways alongside car roads is the norm. What we still try to catch up is Netherland-ish bike lanes, problem's when they do it at all, "they" (city roadworks) implement it in a very Balkan way: they made a bike lane allright but every 10 meters there's a crossing with a 10 cm bump, makes biking on the lane rather impractical if not impossible.
So you are complaining about what is essentially an unfinished construction site ;-)
That aside, I tend to fly over such obstacles by jumping, since I can't remember anymore exactly. Early childhood, or such.
Where I live the balance is much easier. Vegetables, fruit, meat, ... it's all relatively cheap and easy to get, there's supermarkets and bakeries everywhere. Fast food is relatively expensive, so you get something to think about: (expensive+unhealthy but easy) || (cheap+healthy but you need to cook)
In the 70s towns were smaller, fewer people had cars, and there were hardly any supermarkets, so people walked into the town centres and did their grocery shopping there.
Then in 80s we started getting the first out-of-town supermarkets with free parking. You have always had to pay for parking in UK town centres since I can remember.
And the UK government relaxed Sunday trading laws. Many family owned stores stayed closed on a Sunday - having 1 day a week off.
Then supermarkets started offering more 'range', to the point now where many UK supermarkets are like mini-shopping malls. Clothes, music, opticians, locksmiths, pharmacy, and so on. And they started closing their town centre supermarkets and moving everything to the new out-of-town ones.
At the same time UK planning laws now favour developers building 1-2000 homes with a couple of small shops, no High St. or Main St., and as many houses as possible built on all the remaining space for profit. These developments are unsurprisingly nowhere near town centres, so people need to drive. And they don't want to go into a town centre where there's no supermarket, and you have to pay to park. I don't really understand what we're trying to build over here.
Towns that have prevented mainstream chains (Sainsbury, Tesco, Starbuck, MacDonalds) from setting up, have faired far better. Butchers, bakers and greengrocers, small convenience stores (mom+pop groceries) all still exist in those towns, unlike those towns with nearby supermarkets.
So in part, we're not as bad as the US, but we love our cars, and just blindly go to supermarkets now.
One thing to remember is that most women were stay-at-home mums and were grocery shopping every day. But once you have a car and a fridge (1970s) you can go to the supermarket once a week only, which saves a massive amount of time, especially when you now also have a job.
High streets need to be attractive. Old, dodgy shops are dead, clothing shops have a hard time. That's the way it is and best to go with the flow than trying to put things back "the way they were".
New housing developments are awful, though. The price gap between nice neighbourhoods with "old houses" and those will just keep growing.
In fact, my medium sized town (20-30,000 people) has no butchers or bakers left. It also does not have a town centre supermarket. It does however have McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks, Costa, kebab shops, and so on. You can probably guess correctly, that my local town centre is like ghost town.
It is extremely depressing that the UK is becoming like this, whilst at the same time planning rules and regulations (or lack thereof) are encouraging the centralization of shopping habits into large supermarkets in the chase for profits by the house builders.
Independent butchers and grocers have mostly disappeared because they are expensive and less convenient. Places were you can still find some are usually either 'posh' or where the local demographics has special meat/dietary requirements, shall we say...
The advantage of an independent butcher is that you can order in advance or ask them to source/prepare special things (in my experience that's the only way to find fresh lamb kidneys, for instance). But that is less and less the case, and people are less and less interested. And, again, it is much more expensive.
This is not true in the US. There are lots of places with chains (everywhere?) that are growing.
Exactly, all revenue goes back to HQ, and then off to somewhere else.
In some cases being part of a large company means the smaller branches that don't barely break even stay open and it's "good" for those towns in boom years.
But as soon as there's an economic downturn, they are the first stores to be closed.
McDonald's and the rest provide very low wage jobs to locals while leveraging their economies of scale to undercut local competitors on price, while all the profits go into the balance sheet of a company that's headquartered far away, sometimes in a different country.
They are precisely not the local economy as much as those other shops for that reason.
I know this is about the UK, but just as an FYI, in the US, small service sector employers provide an even lower wage because they rarely offer tax advantaged benefits that big businesses can offer, such as subsidized health insurance premiums paid with pre tax income, and paying for retirement savings/public transit/daycare/life insurance/etc with pre tax income.
It is amazing the advantages big businesses have that can afford the time and money expenses of the paperwork for providing those tax advantaged benefits.
BTW the laws weren't changed to level the playing field for small companies, it was just our equivalent of IRS fixing loopholes to bring in more tax money.
They don't provide lower wages than independent shops for similar positions, it's all above board, and they are happy to hire students. I am not convince that they price competitors out, either.
The industry is hard and opening a restaurant or coffeeshop is very hard. I think the thing is that the like of McDonald's and Costa are expert and know how it works, while the person who "always dreamed of opening their own coffeeshop" might not be realistic about what's required.
Also, these days people work far away for customers that are possibly all over the world. They use their money to buy products that come from all over the world. So what does 'local economy' mean? Providing local jobs is good whoever does it.
I think McDonald's are often franchises so they are local busineses even if of course they have to pay to the "mothership".
Supermarkets aren't exactly strangers to price fixing and ripping off customers. Once you've driven off the local competition, you can set your prices to whatever you want. My area is known for high petrol prices, controlled by guess who? Local supermarkets. Drive a few miles and it's 5p per litre cheaper.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/dec/08/supermarket...
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/results/why-its-so-hard-to-prove...
France has really got it right, in my opinion. I don't know how much they subsidize local business, or what their incentives are for training, or if it's just their cultural attachment to good food, but I've traveled across France and never seen a village of over 300 people that didn't have a butcher, a green grocery / dairy shop and at least two kinds of bakeries. Of course there's always a huge Carrefour within driving distance, but even that is stunningly high quality compared with even supermarkets in other countries in Europe (let alone the wretched quality of counter service at supermarkets in the US).
France does not subsidise local business. In fact France is not business-friendly at all.
The French like quality food (and they also like McDonald's) and thus there is a viable market for it. That's all. It's the same in Spain or Italy, for instance.
It’s nothing like the US where the distances are huge and a car is all but mandatory in many/most areas.
The restrictions on Sunday trading are the worst things - the one time I do actually go to a shop is when I’m doing something like DIY and find that I need something at 4pm on a Sunday and a redox is closed, or when I’ve been away for the weekend and can’t stop at the normal local Morrisons as it had to close early.
If you want a town centre to be appealing then make it worth going to.
You would have loved the 70s. Nothing open on a Sunday, and shops closed half day on Wednesdays.
The thing that irks me is - I love shopping at these boutique specialty shops. But man they want to be open 9- 5 on weekdays and mostly are closed when I can actually go there to spend my money. This is just wildly illogical to me. Sure, the people who work there needs their evenings and weekends too.. but, who cares if they are at the shop on a Tuesday at 1 PM?
Looking at the next generation, I don’t have much optimism that such special shops would stay on for long. Some perhaps will cater to the niches and those that can afford very expensive shops. But, the largest parts of stuff is going to be delivered to home from industrial warehouses outside the cities.
Groceries (veggies, milk, meat and stuff) are probably going to be the o lot ones one has to walk into a neighbourhood shop for.
Need DIY stuff? Electronics? Clothing? Toys? Paper towel? Detergent? Anything non-perishable? You’re probably going to need to get online.
But later in life, with three little children, I just simply couldn't imagine a trip to the grocery store every day. Having moved out to the suburbs, public transport or walking wasn't an option any more, and I was already doing enough driving around what with the kids going to school and all kinds of afternoon activities.
I would have actually loved the more car-centric design of North American cities where at least the driving is made easy. No squeezing through small alleys, tiny parking lots (if any) and 3+ stops to get all the things you need for the week.
The reason the North American car centric design works (too) is that it optimizes for convenience rather than environmental concerns (and it's not like European cities optimized for the latter either, they were simply built in pre-car times). Even if the driving distances are further, that doesn't necessarily mean that the overall shopping trip is much longer in practice. And even in cases where it is, I just find it much less stressful to drive in North America. Of course, your mileage may vary.
When I lived in the city center many years ago, there was one larger grocery store about 5 minutes away from me on foot and a couple of smaller stores specialized in one thing or another in the same area. And while that was very convenient for me, it also meant that there was constant traffic in front of my house from people driving to these stores. There wasn't much zoning rules, apparently, the stores where all just mixed in among the residental houses.
(By the way: there's always new 1 or 2 year olds coming in, too...)
I live in the NL, but I can hardly meet any friends. Maybe a difference in culture in Spain?
Average distance to primary/elementary school: 500m (with on average 3.6 schools within a 1km radius, 27.5 within a 3km radius)
Average distance to secondary/middle-high school: 900m (with on average 10.8 schools within a 3km radius)
That's why starting from age 8 or so most kids cycle or walk to school themselves (there are no school busses in the Netherlands AFAIK).
I’m not sure how true this is everywhere. Within walking distance (inner suburb of Dublin on the edge of the city center) I have two Tesco Superstores and about eight Tesco Expresses and Metros (Tesco splits its shop types into broad categories). The ‘superstores’ have the same pricing as each other and as suburban ones, the Expresses and Metros have the same pricing within each category, which is sometimes slightly higher than the Superstores. There’s also an Aldi and a Lidl; both are priced the same as any other Aldi or Lidl, as far as I can see.
If anything it’s more rural areas where you may see higher prices, in that your local ‘supermarket’ may be essentially a jumped-up chain convenience store.
Off the cuff I'd say I save about 20%, and buy a few hundred pounds per trip. Probably saves us amongst a family in the vicinity of $1000/yr. This same concept extended to all other non-food consumables.
I think it can actually save you money.
I’ve lived in London flats where there were multiple large supermarket brands (Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, ASDA) all within easy walking distance. And smaller corner convenience stores like Tesco Express and Co-op and even Amazon’s one. And also some of the discounters (Iceland, Aldi) only slightly further afield.
If you want to save money you just go to whatever supermarket(s) have the best offers on whatever you want to buy. Waitrose, for example, would often have good deals on olive oil and coffee beans but tended to be expensive for fruit & veg. So I’d buy my olive oil and coffee there but go elsewhere for my apples and tomatoes etc… easy to do when all the shops are close together and you’re walking by them anyway!
Besides, you’d be mad to drive to a supermarket in London anyway, waste of time even if you’re buying more than you can carry: just order online, free delivery is usually available (with a minimum order value).
Of course once they have you in the store they’re relying on you buying all the other overpriced (and highly profitable) items…
> So I’d buy my olive oil and coffee there but go elsewhere for my apples and tomatoes etc… easy to do when all the shops are close together and you’re walking by them anyway!
You're just walking into a supermarket carrying bags from other stores? Do that here and you'll quickly have "personal security" in the form of loss prevention following you around the store - if they don't stop you at the door.
Yes. This is 100% not a problem in any place I’ve ever lived. What else are you going to do with your bags? It’s not like you can check them at the door!
Some UK supermarkets now let you just walk around and self-scan your purchases using an app, skipping the check out. So I just pack the things straight into my bag or backpack as I go (no basket or cart), pay, and walk out.
Very occasionally it gets flagged up for a random security check when you go to pay, which just means an employee scans 3 random items from your bag to make sure they match what you scanned. But usually I just walk out straight past the security station and they don’t raise an eyebrow.
(Besides, if security are suspicious about you, they can just keep an eye on you from the back office CCTV anyhow. No need to follow you around the store!)
I drive a Jeep, and therefore don’t have a secure place to keep valuables. I’ve been followed in stores many times because of that, even though I make sure that it’s zipped up and worn over both shoulders in an attempt to reduce suspicion.
In busy UK supermarkets (and malls) there will usually be security guard(s) near the exit. Sometimes they have a little security station where they can monitor the cctv themselves, or otherwise a radio in their ear connected to a back office.
If something suspicious is seen they’ll stop people as they leave and ask to have a look in bags etc.
Ironically, at least for large retailers like Walmart, if they suspect you're actually stealing things they won't physically follow you. Instead, they will monitor CCTV and intercept you at the door. In fact, it goes further than that - they'll allow you to leave if the amount you stole is less than the threshold for a felony. They'll build a profile on you, using facial recognition, and intercept you in the future when the aggregate theft amount reaches the threshold.
This is all very variable, depending on the state, region, city, or even neighborhood. Some Walmarts have no visible security presence while others have multiple uniformed police officers (hired via private contract) at the entrances.
Yes, but what's the point of this? Why risk intimidating legitimate customers? You're just going to offend them and they'll shop elsewhere next time, so you lost revenue.
And if they are a thief, don't you want to actually catch them doing it so you can ban them from the store, or prosecute?
The most successful shoplifters are probably the ones who blend in and don't look suspicious anyway.
Not needing to own a car more than makes up for that.
We have one Aldi, one organic supermarket, 4 REWE, 1 Edeka, and one Penny. Everything but Penny is less than 1 km away from where I live, the closest REWE is 300 meters.
This density falls off when you leave the center, but you still usually have at least one within walking distance.
these give employment to a huge number of people who are simple passive shopkeepers, they do not do any advertising, do not have to raise loans (though some do) or "invest" in anything exotic. just their stock in hand.
since the "concentration" of power is distributed, everyone owns their own shop and nothing more.
majority of the shops don't even have an employee. the owner/family does the whole thing. (mom and pop store)
what this does is, there are no shareholders to satisfy, no shoplifting at the scale it becomes a problem for corps and employees don't care.
this model should be adopted elsewhere too, the opposite of going hyperscale
The world is entering labor shortage zone that will last for as long as we don't figure how to fix reproduction without abandoning human rights (which isn't an option anyway because there are many countries and people can vote with their feet).
Economic models that are as efficient as possible and above all, labor efficient, are thus highly preferrable. It's very likely we will see totally unmanned chain convenience stores soon.
Corner grocery stores aren't really a problem.
Labor for what? Labelling training data?
They work out best if they specialise in less in-demand items, like asian stores or fruit stores (where freshness of produce is their sole goal). But at the same time these simply can't exist every few blocks or so by the nature of being specialised.
That might depend upon your locale.
> small, diverse stores who sell local products over big supermarket chains. Unfortunately, in most big cities in EU
I guess it depends but where I am more upscale areas are full of such shops. Even right next to large supermarkets. They do fine because they offer niche/specialized products at much higher prices, to people who are willing to pay X times more for grass feed ultra organic beef raised in a “small farm” with the deceased cow’s former exact former address on the packaging than for factory processed anonymous beef imported from some “inferior” country..
However while superficially these might seem similar to family owned corner grocery in economically less developed countries they are almost nothing alike.
So you are saying there were no grocery stores in the US before Piggly Wiggly opened up?
It was the model that preceded the current one throughout the western world. It clearly failed because it couldn’t compete with the efficiency (and much better customer experience and prices) provided by supermarkets.
It wouldn’t work without imposing some artificial limitations (as is the case in quite a few European cities) which have a significant productivity cost.
OTOH I once worked in a city there that was younger than I was, and it was a disaster: nothing but drives to franchise "concepts", and had there been anyplace to walk to, there weren't even any sidewalks.
Now I live in a village dating to the 14th century, and don't even need to walk to the store, let alone drive: my groceries get delivered to my doorstep.
As far as I'm concerned, the traditional "supermarket" model is one in which the customer is used as an ersatz employee: you do your own delivery driving, you do your own stock picking, and these days you even do your own checkout scanning.
How is your delivery experience with those?
At second thought I'd miss the haptics/olfactorics of smelling/tasting new kinds(or so far unknown to me) of cheeses, or the general discoverability of other items in store, like soaps, deodorants, shower-gels, shaving-stuff, etc.
Searching and ordering these online is a bad substitute for me.
At third thought all of this delivery-hype should be shunned, because it's just cementing in a class of low-wage workers, ready to be exploited, for the fucking convenience of all the the tasteless assholes giving a shit about such things.
We're old, so discovery is not a big issue — we explore other things; weekly shopping is much more about exploitation[1]. (being able to start from last week's baseline online is a big win over manual shopping, and to some degree we get exploration anyway, as the store always adds in freebies of items they'd like us to try)
Finally, we're not in an anglophone country, so delivery (and removal of the special containers afterwards) is done by a combination of (a) the postal service, (b) transport companies, and (c) employees of the store. All covered by at least union-negotiated baselines; all with insurance and much more than 2 weeks paid vacation; all paid decently[2]. No "independent contractors".
[0] if we cared more, we'd get them at the Friday farmers' market.
[1] we are eating to live, not living to eat
[2] just looked it up: transport employees are USD ~60k/yr, postal carriers ~67k/yr, so the store is probably in that range.
I’m not sure not having those things is at all unique to Anglophone countries
Recently, in my town at least, there are a few larger Turkish supermarkets. I don't see the smaller shops take a hit yet, not sure if things will change.
The person you're responding to mentioned them as "minimarkets which are really small". They still exist and are very important as a last resort thing, or for exotic stuff.
In France sometimes they're called "arab stores" or something along those lines, because they're often held by people of visibly foreign origin (tbf I've seen more Indian/Pakistani/Sri Lankan/Bangladeshi than Arab-held ones), and are great for emergency shopping on Sunday/late at night when you realise you're missing something, but also for exotic products you wouldn't find in a regular supermarket like exotic spices or even high quantities of rice.
They still exist, you just need to know where to find them.
Your corner bakery, butcher & vegetable store are still around, but they tend to serve an upmarket / luxury customer segment these days.
In most big(ger) cities there's "night stores", often run by people of Arab origin (like Lebanese), "toko" (Indonesian grocery store), and Turkish supermarkets (my go-to for dried legumes like lentils, chickpeas, mung beans etc).
Relatively new are organic / "bio" focussed supermarkets. Usually expensive... But they sell many products that regular supermarket chains don't.
In the Netherlands you have supermarkets, some big, some small and sometimes smaller mom and pop stores that sell the basics. They are outcompeted by supermarkets that tend to be very close as well. There are no supermarkets that sell everything, like you might find in France (Hyper Marche, Carrefour) or the US (Walmart).
That means "things required for daily life". They definitely mean supermarket. It's about the same in Rotterdam. I'm an eight minute walk away from four different big supermarket chains. If I walk 10 minutes I can get to the second most distant Albert Heijn.
I carry the groceries in a large-ish (35 L) backpack.
In other cities in the Netherlands you see a likewise pattern.
This isn’t surprising and it isn’t something to extrapolate to anywhere that is even minutely dissimilar.
Flatness is nice (but weather is bad). However, the main thing is infrastructure and mixed zoning. When you build bike lanes, walkable streets and lots of shops, a livable city will follow, not the other way around. Build for the traffic you want rather than the traffic you have.
These stats on supermarkets will be similar in many European cities btw. Many cities in the US are also relatively flat, and you don't see the same thing generally.