Future of brick and mortar stores

[Enigma]

Gas station, naturally you have to have some place to fuel up your car.

Unless the majority of people switch to electric vehicles that they can charge at home. Or that prediction of people switching from private vehicles to autonomous taxis comes about.

Even then, gas stations can be converted to charging stations.

[bilateralrope]

Gas station, naturally you have to have some place to fuel up your car.

Unless the majority of people switch to electric vehicles that they can charge at home. Or that prediction of people switching from private vehicles to autonomous taxis comes about.

Even then, gas stations can be converted to charging stations.

Sure. But, last I checked, charging an electric car takes significantly longer than refueling. Even for fast charging stations, which also wear out the batteries faster than the slow charge at home. A lot of people will prefer to plug their car in overnight at home to having to find stuff to occupy themselves with while the car is charging at a station. Especially if the station imposes a penalty on people who take too long getting back to their car after it's charged.

Though plenty of people won't be in a position where charging at home is even an option.

[Enigma]

But they are necessary for travel outside of the city. Plus not everyone will have 240V chargers. Charging with 120V will take forever if you're on empty.

[bilateralrope]

Ok, so some stations will still exist.

As for charging taking forever, what kind of timeframe are we talking about here ?

[Vendetta]

Even then, gas stations can be converted to charging stations.

Not really. "Fast" charge is still a 30-45 minute job and most gas stations won't have room to accomodate many vehicles.

Elecrification of vehicle infrastructure will require car parks to be turned into charging stations (All of them, that's why electrification is further off than it seems, the infrastructure build required for it is massive). (There's at least one car park in Sheffield that has charging points at some bays for electric cars).

For most commuter use, people will charge at home* and plug in to charge when they park up at work or the shops. The only dedicated charging parks really will be motorway service stations for long distance journeys.



* Less so in England where a large percentage of cars are on-street parking because many houses simply don't even have driveways, just front doors that open directly onto the pavement.

Ok, so some stations will still exist.

As for charging taking forever, what kind of timeframe are we talking about here ?

Slow chargers are usually 3-5 hours.

[Enigma]

This is what I'm talking about.

[bilateralrope]

Slow chargers are usually 3-5 hours.

That's good for overnight charging.

I work security. This means 12 hour shifts. My regular site requires me to park on the street. Other sites I've worked include film sets several km down dirt roads or construction sites that have laid the copper wiring for the houses in the suburb, but haven't buried it yet. Charging at home is the only way I can see electric cars being viable for me.

<snip chart>

Isn't the real question for charging: How many km of range for each hour of charging ?

If the slow charger at home can put slightly more range into a car in 8 hours than the owner uses daily, that seems fast enough for the daily commute.

[bilateralrope]

Elecrification of vehicle infrastructure will require car parks to be turned into charging stations (All of them, that's why electrification is further off than it seems, the infrastructure build required for it is massive). (There's at least one car park in Sheffield that has charging points at some bays for electric cars).

Self driving cars open up another possibility. You park your car and tell it to go charge. It books itself in for a charge, waits until it's time, drives there, charges, then comes back.

The only tech that's missing from this possibility is self driving cars being available for consumer ownership. Plugging in the car at the station can be done by an employee.

[His Divine Shadow]

They seem to be doing fine here. Got 3 grocery stores, 1 car parts / hardware store, 2 stores relating to construction and farming, a butchers shop, three lunch restaurants (thai/kebab/regular finnish stuff), some other fast food places as well, 1 IT/phone/video store, a gas station / mechanic. Really quite seldom we need to go into town, most things can be had here and not really any more expensive than in the city esp. not after you factor in the cost of gas.

I'm actually quite surprised when I think just how much selection we got here despite being such a small place. I can't believe we got three grocery stores ffs. One of them was newly built in 2014 and is huge.

Size of the whole municipality is 6000 people and what I detailed was just in the biggest town of it.

The thing is all those are semi-essential services that aren't very effective to be ordering online. Grocery stores=when you need food, you need it pretty quick, and fresh produce and foods are best bought in a store. Restaurants, naturally, you can't always be cooking for yourself, and they're convenient venues for social events. Gas station, naturally you have to have some place to fuel up your car. And speaking of cars, auto parts and hardware type stuff is also good to have stores for, just run in and grab whatever you need to get the job done rather than wait around for it to come via freight. And so forth.

There are -always- going to be brick and mortar stores for things like that, particularly in rural areas where immediate delivery and ordering in are not options. The stores that are going to vanish will be the very specialized places, the niche places, the stores that aren't supplying anything particularly important. The ones that will survive are the ones that do provide essential goods and services and/or have a social component, which is why earlier in this thread we discussed merging game stores with restaurants.

These all compete with services in the city that is 25-30km away, the small electronics store is competing against half a dozen bigger chain electronics big box stores in the city and surviving. In my experience the latest 30 years of history is full of places like these losing their services and stores. This place is bucking the trend which is why I am bothering writing this. It's not at all a given that a town can retain any basic services.

I've read so many stories the last few years about places of similar size in southern Finland that lost their last grocery store... They live near the great life sucking vortex that is Helsinki though. While we got three, I can't believe it myself that we got three grocery stores, I basically never goto the third, I wonder who does.... We got four actually if we add a smaller town further out. The reason I think is because we have many jobs "on site" still, this isn't a sleeper town where everyone goes in to the city for work and then shop there, many people work and live here and that adds to the life of the place.

[GrosseAdmiralFox]

Sadly, outside of Walmart and stores like it, I'm only seeing that brick and mortar stores are only going to get their asses sunk because people rely on convenience and the path of least resistance.

Remember that town where the only major store was a Walmart, and practically everyone else was forced out of the town? It is only slowly recovering from it's decades of economic destruction.

[Broomstick]

If the slow charger at home can put slightly more range into a car in 8 hours than the owner uses daily, that seems fast enough for the daily commute.

That's how my sister's car works - overnight charge gets her through both legs of the commute.

Usually.

Extreme cold will degrade battery efficiency (and that's true for all batteries. The car does have a back-up gas tank to extend the range. She does use it from time to time. Not very often at all, but if she didn't have it she'd be stranded between once every couple months (summer) to one or more times a month (winter). A charger at work would help with that, but it doesn't exist at this point. Bottom line it's the back-up tank for the occasional times the charge isn't quite enough is what makes it a workable car.

That said - she does like her electric car.

The technology is good at this point, but better would be, well, better. And it's not suitable for everyone's situation.

[Elheru Aran]

The reason I think is because we have many jobs "on site" still, this isn't a sleeper town where everyone goes in to the city for work and then shop there, many people work and live here and that adds to the life of the place.

That is definitely part of it. If you are willing to drive a long distance for jobs, it's not a great stretch to add in going to a store, and given the drive it makes sense for the store to be a big-box retailer where you can get practically everything you need at once; ergo, Walmart's popularity in rural areas in the US, and the subsquent dying off of the local grocery store... which do still survive in urban areas and larger towns, where people have less distance to cover and are able to take time out of their day to leave the house and go get groceries and then go to a more specialized store for whatever else they need nearby.

Small towns will only really survive if there are people invested in that community via jobs; otherwise, they're going to be like I have seen in Mississippi and other parts of the US, a few houses and a small convenience store and a gas station, and the rest of the 'community' lives within something like 50 square miles, dispersed among the woods, driving long distances to their jobs in the closest big city.

[His Divine Shadow]

Lots of this municipality is spread out as well, population density is only 27 people per square mile or. But that doesn't matter as those enough of those people either work as farmers on their own farms, or work at the jobs in the municipality and so have closer to the stoers here.

Infact the new store that came here has been having people traveling from other municipalities further out instead of going to the city, also shaves down on their travel.

[Elheru Aran]

Lots of this municipality is spread out as well, population density is only 27 people per square mile or. But that doesn't matter as those enough of those people either work as farmers on their own farms, or work at the jobs in the municipality and so have closer to the stoers here.

Infact the new store that came here has been having people traveling from other municipalities further out instead of going to the city, also shaves down on their travel.

It sounds like what you have is an energetic rural community that's at just about the right population to sustain those grocery stores, keep enough jobs in the area for people to be reasonably close to home, and therefore you get a more successful centralization of economy. This, obviously, is not the case everywhere, particularly in areas like the US that are so big that it's very easy for populations to be very widely dispersed; someone whose address is nominally in one town might actually be closer to another town and thus frequent the stores -there- to the detriment of the first town. It's not unusual for small rural communities in the US to largely depend upon larger central towns rather than establishing their own trade centers.

EDIT to add: The vital thing here is that the jobs are closer to home. Farming is largely dead in the US, having been eaten wholesale by agricultural corporations. Even 'organic' and 'small' farms are mechanized enough that they don't need anywhere near the number of hands they used to. So what happens is that people in rural communities end up driving longer distances for work, which means that they aren't going to bother looking in their own communities because all those jobs are probably going to already be taken up. As such, you will see more large brick-and-mortar all-in-one stores in said larger central towns, fewer stores in the small communities.