There’s been shrinkage…
In the 1980′s grocery chains introduced the Hypermarket, giant industrial sized warehouse stores based on European models. It made sense for Europe as many small, dense, urban settings could not support large supermarkets. Most European citizens could walk to their local bakery, cheese shop, or butcher shop for their staples, but had to drive out of the town center to get their 2-liter Coca Cola or tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby. Gas was cheap and travel was easy.
We had a similar condition in America with cheap gas and suburban sprawl. Supermarkets started here in the early nineteen thirties with King Kullen of Long Island and have been growing in size ever since. The driving boom of the nineteen fifties sparked the advent of drive-in theaters and drive-thru restaurants as well as the supermarket with its iniquitous expansive parking lot.
With the spike in gas prices and the comprehension that gas is a shrinking natural resource, Americans are restricting their driving distances and retailers are heeding the change. Malls are dying around the country because people don’t want to spend gas money to get to these shops. Christmas sales, always used as an indicator for clothing and other retail shops’ yearly comparitive sales, have been shrinking every year since the mid eighties. The mall shops are not providing anything new or special. A person could drive to a mall, buy a sweater as a gift, send it across the country to its recipient, and that person could simply drive to their mall and exchange it, because their mall had the exact same shops!
The same shrinkage in sales has been occuring with grocery stores. The economy has forced many Americans to shop for groceries rather than dine out, but their shopping habits in general have shifted. In the late eighties and early nineties, prepared foods were the hit of the market. Grocery stores offered premade enchiladas, meatloaf, roast turkey and potatoes, and lasagna, all in little plastic microwave-able containers. Of course these items were called “value-added” products and came at a premium, but shoppers literally ate them up despite the high price and stores raked in the profits. Store design reflected this change in shopping by increasing the Delicatessen line up and adding open cases for pre-prepared food display.
Suddenly shoppers have changed. The pre-prepared foods are sitting on the shelves, passing their sell-by dates. Instead, consumers are heading for staples and general canned grocery items. The hypermarket is just too big, offers just too many ”value-added” items, and is just too far to drive to.
Enter the ‘neighborhood’ market. The most successful markets in Great Brittain, Tesco, started buying up land in America years ago, secretly preparing for an invasion. Fresh & Easy, Tesco’s American prototype began opening a little over a year ago and they are already on their way to hundreds of locations. These aren’t convenience stores, in the traditional sense, they are mini-grocery stores focused on a few staples and a few prepared foods, but located in urban and suburban areas.
Safeway has opened two prototypes in the under-twenty-thousand square feet size. Krogers has five different divisions of small stores, and one, its Turkey Hill stores, are currently expanding at a rapid pace.
Small stores can fit where large stores can’t. Small stores can focus on just a few selections where large stores need to provide many different product mixes including service departments. Stores like Costco or Sam’s Club won’t disappear, in face they’re doing just fine. But the food deserts created by large supermarkets unable or refusing to serve dense neighborhoods has given rise to an influx of smaller prototpyes.
Yes, the economy has cooled down, and so there has been some shrinkage.
I found this post particularly facinating. I love the idea of going back to little downtown businesses, but sadly around here in this part of the state they are fleeing the downtown district and heading out to Wal-Mart because they don’t like the idea of going to several stores to find what they need.
I battle with that a lot seeing as I am/was a small town store in the middle of a residential district and I struggled just to get my neighbors in the doors for basic things like milk and eggs. I still found them going to Wal-Mart and getting everything at once instead of walking across the street and shopping for just what they needed.
I think we have a long way to go to accept not driving and finding things locally. I’m saddened by how small our farmer’s market has gotten because no one goes there, they would rather drive by and go to Wal-Mart and buy produce from half way across the country. It’s frustrating but I really do hope it goes back to the small stores.