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Comment by vector_spaces | Hacker News Reader

In large swaths of the country, these "non-grocery stores" are a lifeline, as they are the only option. In others, you don't even have that -- gas station convenience stores might be that lifeline instead. [1]

I am familiar with what the grandparent is referring to, having spent a decade running purchasing teams in US grocery stores. Even in urban areas with many different food retail stores, a typical supermarket in the US is a fairly difficult place to shop for someone with specific food sensitivities. Hopefully folks here who live in the SF Bay Area appreciate that it's a total outlier in both the diversity of stores available and the assortment of products sold in a typical Bay Area supermarket

[1] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...

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For most US supermarkets, shop around the perimeter and avoid anything in any of the center aisles. While individual floor plans vary, that tends to route you to the fresh produce and meats and dairy and avoid most of the ultraprocessed packaged stuff.

I give this advice to anyone I meet who just moved here from overseas.

Is there a better source for that data? I appreciate that you're at least bringing data to the discussion, but honestly I kind of don't buy it, having lived all over the US from rural farm communities to Manhattan. I think I can identify where I live right now on that map, by virtue of being right on the border of IL/IN and Lake Michigan, and it has a little indication of "food desert", but it certainly isn't.

This just doesn't align with reality; your chart is practically meaningless.

Yes, in rural areas you often need to drive further than 1 mile to get to a grocery store. That doesn't mean that normal food doesn't exist for these people.

But it's more than a mile away!

The SF Bay Area is hardly an outlier. There may be more specialty grocery stores here, but the large supermarkets where most consumers buy most of their food are the same as anywhere else. If you compare a Safeway in Mountain View, CA to a Publix in Daytona Beach, FL or a Kroger in Toledo, OH there isn't much difference in the products available.

I hope that you recognize that your casual-outsider evaluation of the assortments of these stores is deeply flawed and not based on actual data. If you think about it even just a little bit, you'll recognize that it wouldn't make sense for a supermarket in one of the highest median income cities in the country to have assortment parity with a chain targeting cost conscious shoppers. The devil here is in the long-tail, which is definitionally less visible to you as a shopper, and in fact may not exist at all for certain retailers -- especially those targeting cost-conscious shoppers.

Safeway is the cost conscious option in Mountain View, compare it with the other options (Whole Foods, Nijiya). The comparison between Publix and Safeway is apt.

The "cost conscious" option in a city with one of the highest median incomes in the US is very different from a cost conscious shopper in a city like Daytona Beach, where practically a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line!

I will also point out that "cost conscious" is one of several shopper profiles that Safeway targets, but broadly speaking Safeway targets a more affluent shopper (although cost conscious isn't the same as non-affluent). The degree to which a particular location services these targets varies by area. But no, these stores target fundamentally different shoppers and think very differently about assortment, at least with regard to the long tail

Heh, in Mountain View you also have these choices:

- La Plaza Market

- 99 Ranch

- Grocery Outlet

- Rose Market

- Nob Hill

- Lucky

- Smart & Final

- Walmart

- Target

- India Cash & Carry

- Bharat Bazar

I'm probably leaving out a ton.

Ironically in SF it seems inversed. Whole Foods is second cheapest to Trader Joe’s, and Safeway is the most expensive.

I live in Los Altos next to Mountain View and Safeway is very expensive compared to every other option except Whole Foods. There are a few items they have that are the same as others, like bananas so I sometimes walk to the closest Safeway to stock up on those but otherwise one has to be wary of the pricing.

Safeway in the Bay Area regularly comes up very close to the same cost as Whole Foods, unless one regularly uses the app and clips the saving coupons for Safeway.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Whole-Foods-vs-Safeway-W...

Ranch 99 and the little De Martini's produce shop undercut Safeway prices on produce in Mountain View. The comparable items work out to be less expensive at Trader Joe's versus Safeway, too, last time I looked. Produce at Costco is regularly less than all of the above but I only buy a few produce items that I can freeze for later use there. For me the two advantages to Safeway are the extended hours of operation and the locations being convenient.

I lived in rural areas a large portion of my life. What you are describing is limited to areas with extremely small populations. Meaning even my hometown of a few thousand has a Walmart (put up when I was a kid in the 90s) an Aldi, and two local grocery stores with tons of healthy options.

So yeah, there are a lot of towns that fit that criteria (less than 1000 residents). But as a portion of U.S. population it is not substantial in any way.

i lived in one of those small towns through highschool, just a blinking yellow light and a gas station. What we did, and everyone did, was drive the 20miles to the large town with a Walmart and get groceries there. It only takes 20min because there's no lights or traffic in those areas so the time commitment is about the same as living in a city. My mom made meals from her recipes using basic ingredients so it's certainly feasible to eat how you want in these areas. Only in the most rare/extreme cases are people forced to grocery shop at a gas station.

I've got family in the rural Midwest. It would surprise me if their town wasn't a food desert by these definitions. You might go grab a thing of milk or sliced bread in a pinch at the convenience store, but yeah otherwise you just make the short drive into "the city" to get food at a regular grocery store.

Or you just ate the food you were growing on your own lot, or what your neighbors were growing, or from the farmer selling stuff off the highway.

I hope you recognize that your claims are deeply flawed and don't align with the reality that most middle-class grocery shoppers experience. Regardless of what you think makes "sense", major supermarkets throughout the country have rough assortment parity (with minor differences for regional consumer preferences). In some cases the long tail is actually longer in lower median income cities because labor is cheaper and stores are physically larger (cheaper real estate). That Publix where I shopped in Daytona Beach is enormous.

Instead of making things up you can just go look. Many supermarkets have online ordering now so you can see exactly what they stock at each local store.

Yes -- I know that my experiences don't align with most middle-class grocery shoppers: I worked in the food business for a decade where assortment was literally my job. There is a lot that casual shoppers like you don't notice! That's actually built in.

In any case, I love most of what you have written here.

Online ordering enables larger long tails. In which market do you suppose online ordering is more common, Daytona Beach or Mountain View?

If you were managing assortment at a Publix in Daytona Beach, how would you structure your long tail? Would you look to a Safeway in Mountain View as a model to follow?

Safeway has an in-house organic brand, "O Organics". I can easily go to Safeway and pick up only organic foods. I don't know if that's true for Publix or Kroger.

UPDATE: ChatGPT tells me that at Publix it's called "GreenWise Organic" and at Kroger it's called "Simple Truth Organic"

Organic food does not make it any healthier than non-organic choice. Organic UPF will still be UPF with excess of sugar/salt.

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