Comments by "" (@kaitlyn__L) on "U.S. and European Zoning, Compared" video.
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Motor industry lobbying, and the postwar boom in population and housing. Plus of course, the Interstate system, which was built through the middle of many neighbourhoods and split them in twain.
Then there was also “white flight”, where middle class white families almost all moved out from cities into suburbs on those postwar government subsidised mortgages. (Poorer and black families had to stay in the cities, whose tax revenue thus fell dramatically, creating criminogenic conditions, which led to the 60s and 70s’ urban strife.)
Of course, it’s not solely down to motor industry lobbying. In the 50s especially, when all of it was new and roads were mostly free-flowing, having to drive was treated less like a burden and more like an exciting new opportunity. Roadside attractions and motels and road trips quickly became part of the cultural zeitgeist, where people went on holidays without planning them because the infrastructure was all there to accommodate them no matter where they found themselves.
Big box stores also didn’t quite exist, the closest was a big department store and that’s a very different experience. So most people just drove to “main street” very nearby their suburb, and with no traffic congestion, it didn’t seem like an imposition.
After that new model of lifestyle began to settle-in, the first supermarkets began to pop-up. But they were still small compared to today — more like a modern Aldi or Lidl. And they were always just on the outskirts of the suburban area, so the drive compared to “main street” was still similar.
But then megamarts/hypermarkets and the modern mall began to appear, built further-out from living centres to get the economies of scale on their land purchases. For a time they were just an “option”, a further-afield drive for rarer or larger or specialty items. But their economies of scale started bringing the margins for the smaller supermarkets down, and they started going out of business. Some of them were replaced with smaller strip malls but not all of them.
In a way, it’s a lot like the Malthusian Trap of agriculture, where every step along the path creates further lock-in with a ratcheting effect.
And of course nowadays even the hypermarkets are struggling to compete with even larger, even more centralised, “fulfilment centre” warehouses. The companies needed delivery networks to get them to the final store anyway, so delivering them to the home isn’t that much additional overhead. Cut out the actual stores, and the total overhead can even be lower than a hypermarket.
And every time enough of the stores go out of business and remain vacant, sooner or later it’s re-zoned as more residential, further increasing sprawl, which further increases car dependence, which further increase’s people’s need to buy more of their daily needs at once to make up for the gas costs, which drives further business monopolisation.
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@computernerdtechman so, have you ever had the scenario with a missing ingredient for a recipe? What’s your workaround? Also, here’s an economic argument for you: even ignoring gas prices, time is money. Given your wage or salary, is it worth the extra time going to a centralised location? I know you said it’s a 10 minute drive, but that won’t be taking traffic, parking, loading up into your trunk, unpacking on the other end, etc. What else would you be able to do with that half an hour? Again, bearing in mind I’m not advocating for switching entirely to local shopping, just using it for smaller and fresh items. Larger and long life items would still be bought en masse once a month.
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@computernerdtechman I didn’t say they would. I said they compete with each other.
So you might save 80 cents on a larger bottle of ketchup, but that doesn’t offset the gas costs, so then you’re incentivised to always “stock up” to make it “worth it”. So instead of being able to pop down to the store for bread and milk and ketchup, you try to only go when you need a big weekly/fortnightly shop.
No one who lives near a corner store exclusively relies on them. The idea that one store has to be the best option in all cases is ridiculous. Larger, further away stores simply get visited less frequently, and have far less sway over the economy at large.
Say you want to cook something for a date, but you’re missing one ingredient. Do you want to drive all the way to the hypermarket, find and deal with parking, walk to the store, find the right aisle, get tempted into impulse buys, and then go home? Or do you just cook something else and wait until the next large grocery run perhaps? A corner store allows a 5 minute walk to pick up that one ingredient without disrupting the flow of your cooking, and you’re in and out in 5 minutes too.
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