Zaune wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Would be happy to hear your thoughts.
Obvious candidates would be zoning, rent density (storekeepers may pay less rent per square foot of floor space than tenants)... any others?
The economies of scale, and the politics of scale. The big supermarket chains have the clout to negotiate directly with the suppliers, and drive a hard bargain at that. The independent retailers can't compete on price, so they restrict their food offerings to basics like milk and bread, or convenience food; the consumer pays extra for not having to drive five miles to the supermarket.
Odd that the chains haven't moved into the convenience store market in the US themselves the way they have in Britain, though; are you folks really as car-dependent as Bill Bryson makes you out to be?
Yes, Bill Bryson got that right.
Actually, Wal-Mart is now attempting to move into the convenience store market in Chicago, but that is partly due to the City of Chicago having sufficient clout to make it a condition of Wal-Mart entering Chicago proper at all. That's just this year, it will be interesting to see if it succeeds or not.
It's not
just economies of scale. When I moved to Chicago in the early 1980's there the small food store incorporated into the apartment block was still
common. Genuinely common. That was partly because an "apartment block" in Chicago might well consist of a row of 40 foot skyscrapers - there was a HUGE population on the block to draw from.
However, in the intervening years, zoning rules changed, in some cases either eliminating such stores (resulting in strictly residential blocks where before the street level had been all sorts of little businesses) or making their existence more difficult. At one point the city council actively tried to move all businesses to strip malls thought a combination of zoning changes, onerous additional regulations on "storefronts" (that's what they call such businesses in the Chicago area), and changes in property taxes on business property that drastically increased the cost of business. The result is that the former web of small business in local neighborhoods has vanished.
Here's an exercise anyone with a Netflix or other video account can do. Rent the original
Blues Brothers movie. That was filmed in and around Chicago. The Loop/downtown scenes are what I'm talking about here. In that movie you can see that on street level there are rows of small businesses - pharmacies, barbar shops, newstands. That's all the street level was.
Those businesses are now completely gone. ALL of them. The SRO where the boys were in a ridiculously small single room (with a high ceiling) with the train going by outside? That was a real SRO. You could rent by the day, week, or month. Yeah, pretty cramped but it beats a cardboard box on the street and for the poor could function as a permanent address. (You could also stay overnight in one - my spouse did so a couple of times when he was caught in the Loop by severe weather, rather than attempt to drive the freeways.) They were minimal, but cheap. They kept the poor and minimally functional out of the weather and off the streets. Gone, all gone, shut down by the city via changes in code.
Oddly enough, in my area, I have recently seen a large, formerly single-family home converted to single-room rentals "by the week or the month". Is it an ideal situation? No, of course not, but better than homelessness.
Of course, I am speaking of only the Chicago area, but you can't blame this on big business - part of it was a
deliberate elimination of old system. The motivations were varied - some felt the old style was old fashioned or seedy-looking, some thought to profit by building a strip mall that the businesses would then be forced to move into, and so on. It was not, however, accidental or a side effect of suburbia and cars. The street-level businesses survived into the 1980's in Chicago, but did not survive the 1990's.
Now, to be fair, there has been some push-back. For instance, the underground pedway in Chicago has a fair number of businesses of this sort, although construction and remodeling also pushed some out of business as well. However, the pedway is not very well known to tourists or casual visitors and thus does not capture that potential market. It's known to commuters who take the trains to and from work and that's about it. Some large office buildings have stores off their lobbies - but no street entrances, which discourages casual shoppers as they now have to go through the lobby of a business to access such stores. And out in the neighborhoods these stores are largely just
gone. On the north side Clark and Broadway still have some blocks of survivors, and parts of Sheridan road but they're barely hanging on. Torrance avenue and Halstead on the south side still have some surviving storefront areas, but they're circling the drain. Five streets out of a city that used to have these stores on virtually every block of every street.
But apparently mangoes are a popular fruit in this area, ALL the stores sell them. Anyhow, most of the canned goods are canned in Melrose Park, Illinois (another Chicago suburb) according to the labels, as is much of the boxed stuff like noodles. I suspect part of the savings involved significantly lower transportation costs than, say, shipping things thousands of kilometers from California. (Of course, things like orange juice and ocean fish have to be shipped thousands of kilometers to reach my area, but that's due to the ocean and orange-friendly climate being that far away)