A Death in the Neighborhood—Part 1

Walking to the train yesterday, I passed what used to be the best supermarket in the neighborhood. Since the end of March it has been a boarded-up hulk. It closed, not because it was losing money (it wasn't), but because it could not expand. The owner tried to buy more land, but our local transit authority, which owned the land, claimed it couldn't sell because of tax problems.

This was not exactly a market failure—the store was viable and could have gone on more or less as it was. But the owner's desire to expand was a result of the market's constant pressure to make food stores into one-stop shops: pharmacies, catering services, hardware stores, grocery stores, photo developers, florists, you name it. In the space he had, the store's owner could not provide all these services.

Why is it that grocery stores (which is what supermarkets used to be) have become afflicted with galloping featuritis? The grocery business is risky, with small profit margins, so part of the pressure for expansion is a desire to increase profit margins. But part of it is the result of poor land use. Most supermarkets now are located in the suburbs, which are sprawling and car-dependent. People hate to drive from one store to another, using more and more fuel and struggling to find parking space; they would rather shop in one place. Hence the advent of everything-stores like Giant and Wal-Mart, which provide food, medicine, hardware, toys, and just about everything else under one roof. A large grocery store, which is what our local supermarket was, can't hope to compete with this when its customers can simply drive to the suburbs and find commercial palaces that also undercut the grocery store's prices.

The closure of this store had nothing to do with quality. The meat, fish, and produce were generally better than those found in the everything stores. The selection of specialty items like olive oil was often (though not always) better than its competitors. It was, in other words, a very good place to shop. It just could not be all things to all people.

The saddest part of the whole story is that this market was a genuine neighborhood store. It was, of course, a supermarket, which meant that it was a big box store with a large parking lot. But it fronted on the main street, and it was within walking distance of a large population, including many elderly people. The staff knew the customers (one of them once asked me why I was shopping in the afternoon rather than my usual morning time). The store was located next to a commuter train station, so you could pick up something for dinner on your way home. Checkout times were short, and checkout clerks were friendly and, as with the rest of the staff, knew many of their customers by sight.

The neighborhood will survive, but the loss of this store is a major blow. There is another supermarket about a quarter mile up the street. Its quality is generally poor, and checkout lines are human traffic jams even when there are relatively few shoppers in the store. A lot more people than before will choose to shop outside the neighborhood, which means longer drives and more use of gasoline (and more greenhouse gas emissions). And the neighborhood is saddled with a decaying building and its surrounding parking lot. If no one buys the property and develops it, it will be a lasting hole in what remains of the fabric of the street.

In the future, we will need more neighborhood stores, not fewer, within easy walking distance. We can't afford to lose the ones we have.