Neighborhood Grocery Stores Vs. The Big Guys

The friendly neighborhood grocery store is being eaten alive by the megastores. The if-you-want-it-we've-got-it stores are driving the small basic food and drink stores out of business. Most of the little stores closed years ago, when shoppers discovered that they could buy everything they needed in one place. Tradition still meant going to neighborhood grocery stores in some places, but since the owners didn't have enough room to store mass quantities of items, they paid higher prices than the giant retailers did. This meant charging their customers higher prices, thus losing many of them.

The last of the Mom-and-Pop grocery stores are still friendly places with owners who are more than willing to help customers find just what they are looking for. Unfortunately, they don't have a huge selection, so even if nine out of ten of the things on a shopper's list are there, it's more convenient to go to a store that has all ten. Wal-Mart, Target and others offer one-stop shopping, but there's a catch.

It used to make sense to stop at the grocery store on the way home from work just to pick up a lemon. Now that stop includes parking in a parking lot the size of Central Park, walking across it to a store that is even bigger, traipsing through the gardening supplies, maternity clothes, office furniture, unmentionables, pet food, junk food and health food departments to get to the produce section. After finding the lemon, it is necessary to go back through all those departments in order to pay for it. Then comes standing in line at one of the two out of twenty registers that are open. The line consists of shoppers with overflowing baskets, people who put much more thought into planning this trip than you did. They avoid making eye contact, not wanting to sacrifice their places in line to accommodate a lemon purchaser. By the time all the price checks, debit card denials and calls for the manager are taken care of, the lemon is no longer cold. Then there has to be a price check on it.

Maybe it would have made more sense to use some of the lemon juice in that bottle that's been in the fridge forever.

Running across the street and maybe another block or two to get a loaf of bread and a box of cereal was so simple. It could be done on the spur of the moment and only took a few minutes. It didn't require planning a whole morning or afternoon around it. Wouldn't it be nice if there were still grocery stores that were so convenient? If they get enough shoppers, maybe the ones that still exist will stay open.