The next revolution is zoning reform so it's legal to build shopping people want to do within walking distance of where they live.
Realistically you aren't going to reach more than 250k skus within a 20 minute walk of your home, and probably less. Even this is very heavily biased towards using retail space instead of space for anything else (homes, restaurants, parks, offices). You can only build up to add more space within a 20 minute walk so much, because traveling vertically takes time.
With only 250k skus, you're still ordering from outside of walking distance often for items. This is much less variety then the average consumer is use to. Now, you have a dense area with lots of people and lots of business all needing goods brought in and waste brought. It's doable, but requires the right planned infrastructure, and people start trying to optimize the last mile with ideas like package lockers.
EDIT: It's probably possible to reach 250k if you heavily lean on books/cds/dvds with only a few copies each. The actual daily items you'd expect a store to keep in stock (and thus need more inventory of each sku) end up just consuming a lot of space.
Price conscious buyers will opt to drive to the bigger, farther away store because it has more variety, and the essentials are cheaper.
I know I do this.
Part of this is overregulation, with zoning and planning departments enacting policies that make smaller retail spaces less attractive to builders and owners, leading to a low supply, and allowing egregious rent for well located small retail.
Yes, economies of scale likely mean that larger businesses can afford lower prices, but smaller businesses also get to avoid some costs (no large administrative corporate departments necessary for a one-location bodega), so the prices probably don't need to be as far apart as they are.
Robinson-Patman is terrible law that’s more or less impossible to enforce equitably. So it hasn’t been.
I hope government representatives have things to say about that.
A world where it’s enforced uniformly and strictly might have some local benefits, but getting the government involved in regulating every wholesale transaction for “fairness” is a recipe for stagnation, corruption, or more likely both.
It’s much better for governments to be principled, and only interfere with mutually voluntary engagements by citizens when there’s an urgent harm to remedy.
Aldi and Lidl carry ~2-3k SKUs. A regular grocery will carry maybe 20k. In places where enough of these are built close to where people actually live you don’t ever need to touch the car for shopping. Small shopping centers (those that also have a something like a small book store) will add a few more thousands. A requirement of 250k SKUs in a 20min walking distance is going in the territory of once in a year or more purchases.
I think I drove to do groceries a handful of times in the last 10 years. I have multiple chains close enough that I can always walk, I can buy smaller batches and always have fresh food rather than a truckload to last a whole week but be stale by the end. Self checkouts and the abundance of stores means I have almost 0 wait time.
It can work but it has to be designed properly, and people need to change their habits a bit. Like not expecting hundreds of thousands of SKUs 10 min away at all times (which implies a huge store, so far from where people live).
Lidl also has this interesting approach that they rotate some assortment. You can't find everything all the time. But once you realize that certain things periodically come back, you pick them up when they are in stock to make sure you have them at home. It is not as convenient, but if you make it a habit, it is a very minor disadvantage.
But as you say the 20k SKUs premium stores stock aren’t a necessity. They drive up the costs for the store and the price for the buyer all so the buyer has the feeling they bought something different, when many brands are anyway the same product under different labels.
The premium store 3 minutes from my home stocks 30 types of mineral water. Aldi and Lidl stock maybe 3 of those 30. That’s what 99% of people buy anyway.
Until there's one less common thing you want. If you don't care much about flavour or have no taste in products then you can sub in any crap food or product.
I go to a particular supermarket because it has the tomatoes I like: they just can't be substituted. It also has an uncommon milk that is the only one I really like. The issue gets harder once you desire specific Deli foods.
How much of SKU selection is driven by individual consumer tastes? Some brand selection is driven by other causes.
250k SKUs means everything anyone would ever want. But the distribution of the demand for those SKUs is very lopsided. 20k are what everyone buys. Another 20k are probably things almost nobody buys. So how could you have both high and low demand items spread equally through a city without creating waste? If everything needs to be 10-20 min from you then somewhere a store is sitting empty with barely any customers or a shelf isn’t touched by anyone. The logistics for stocking and supplying products almost nobody buys costs everyone else.
As another point of comparison: Costco themselves say[2] that they have about 4k SKUs, and state that most supermarkets have about 30k SKUs.
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Anecdotally, I can find just about everything I want, in terms of consumables, at Kroger.
Sometimes I walk over to the bodega instead. They don't have much for inventory outside of beer/smokes/soda, and their selection of actual food is both limited and expensive. But it's only a block away, so...
[1]: https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/the-largest-supermarke...
I think people are underestimating the variety of products that are available.
But there is the added complication of weight. I can’t buy food for a week without driving there. Nor can I go and buy a TV by just walking to the hardware store.
> Nor can I go and buy a TV by just walking to the hardware store.
Do you buy a TV more than once every 5-10 years? You can rent a small van or whatever.
I'd grab one of those except for the fact that I don't have a sidewalk connecting me to the grocery store. Totes end up working better for me as a result.
And again, more limited space.
I commute by walking (1h per day) and typically avoid the car when possible, but for groceries there’s just no way I’d go back to walking to and fro.
It means my fridge can be smaller because I don't need to keep as much in there. It means it is really easy to shop whatever is on sale - I have two grocery stores near me. I rarely have vegetables that go bad because I can just buy the stuff I need. I can just stop on the way home from work if I'm working the day shift.
I did this for a while when I lived in the states, too, in a small town. I had a similar experience, but it was far less convenient and really only doable because I was in such a small town and lived alone.
If your events are regular, then you don't need to do the research each time either; and it becomes maybe an extra five or ten minutes.
Living without a car is easily possible, lots of parts of europe do it. They do it by living in small aparments, consuming less with more staples
I'm in Norway. Vehicles are expensive, children (regardless of age) are used to going outside and going to the stores. It is a common situation in larger cities. Heck, elementary children are often enough at the store unsupervised. I'm not sure why you think a 20-30 minute car ride plus at least an hour at the store is worse than a 20 minute round trip to the store with a 10-15 minute store break is bad, even if it is a few times a week. And even that can be avoided by just spending a little time on your way home from work.
I went to that grocery store twice yesterday (picked up a bag of popcorn and a bottle of water to go to the movies, then later some potatoes and sour cream for dinner). I'm going in a few minutes to get eggs for lunch. So three times in the last 24 hours :-)
You're not wrong, but millions (literally) of people do afford to live in NYC. I live in Harlem, which is more fun and more affordable than many areas.
I'm from Harlem, and other parts of NYC. I moved out to pursue a career in an industry that is relatively non-existent in the NYC metro area. If I moved back now I could probably afford it on my current salary. But there are no jobs there for what I do. And if there was a bigger tech industry in NYC the costs would likely be even higher.
Sure I could buy two or three different types of keyboards within walking distance, but none of them used my favorite mechanical switches. I was constantly facing choices where I would either need to travel by vehicle to a speciality store (train, bus or car), or I would order the item in. Judging by the flow of packages into my multi-residential building others were facing the same choice.
One of the major points(/claims?) of the OP article is that fewer choices is better, pointing to how Costco has just 4k SKUs (paragraphs 4, 5, 6, and some within later paragraphs). <shrug>
I don't even consider those when shopping online.
Its not that the ideas are bad or wholly wrong, but their is a sizeable contingent of followers who believe that walkable living is a silver bullet that fixes everything. Everything.
So to someone who happens to fall into contact with an evangelist, they sit and listen for a few minutes, and then come away like they just learned who the real God is. Any societal or personal illness you can think of, the Church of Fuckcars has a confident and surface level "makes sense" answer.
And this is ignoring the possibility of ordering less time sensitive specialty goods to a relevant store, where they can arrive on an existing shipment and share an errand with whatever else you might want from that store.
It’s almost like the AI answering “should I walk or drive to the nearest carwash”. Sure I can walk, I just can’t complete the grocery shopping lol.
And then there’s heavier things to carry (drinks).
You go with the kids and/or wife and you do it on the way to or back from work or to/from school drop off.
You don't do dedicated grocery runs, they're detours on top of your existing trips.
If you live in a dense environment where you don’t need a car because walking and transit cover your normal life, recouping that much money often more than pays for the higher cost per square foot of building space.
30% of New Yorkers spend > 50% of their income on rent.
My point was that’s a bit less than the median suburbanite here spends on housing and cars combined. That doesn’t mean either option can’t be improved but that these comparisons should compare the whole lifestyle cost. Otherwise you’re making the same mistake Americans do saying they pay much less in taxes than Europeans without including the additional spending we make for healthcare, college, childcare, etc.
Statistically, a large amount of that is beyond what they need most of the time (whether size, quality, or range).