Consumers across Europe no longer want to travel to big car-dependent hypermarkets on the edge of cities to buy food and goods. Here’s why.

  • petrescatraian
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    11 year ago

    @poVoq I don’t know anyone living in rural areas any longer, but last I remember there was no village without something called “mixt shop” (magazin mixt) - that is, a local small store with various food and household stuff.

    As people in rural areas mostly do farming, they do not really need that many fruits and vegetables, and eggs (sometimes even drinks), as they can source them from their own land (although they are still sold there though). Some people also sell their stuff directly, in front of their houses. For example, if you drive along when there’s the season, you can also get some watermenlons on a budget.
    @ajsadauskas

    • AJ Sadauskas
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      11 year ago

      @petrescatraian @poVoq Is that roughly akin to a general store?

      Here, there are still many small towns with a local supermarket that gets its products distributed by IGA or Foodworks, but in any town above around 1000 people, Coles or Woolworths have moved in and taken over.

      Up until about 20 or 30 years ago, we also used to have small grocery stores (called milk bars) in most local shopping strips in the big metro areas, but they’ve also been crushed by the big supermarket chains.

      • petrescatraian
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        1 year ago

        Is that roughly akin to a general store?

        Exactly this.

        IGA or Foodworks

        IGA seems like a Mega Image (translated URL) but with more CSR and Foodworks seems like the same thing but with only local (australian) food (don’t know if that’s the case. Digging deeper, I find that the closest thing that we have here is something called La Doi Pași (roughly translating as two-steps away - it’s an expression we use for everything that lies in close proximity to you, whether those two-steps are actually 20-30m, 200m etc.) - that is, regarding the coverage in rural areas. Otherwise, yea, those were general stores, totally independent from each other.

        small grocery stores […] in most local shopping strips

        Was that a thing? Wow, our malls always were just one supermarket from a well-known chain and the rest was mostly clothing stores, a food court and a cinema.