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In Baltimore, maybe. I think a poor person would have a difficult time getting to most Whole Food locations in DC.
Giant got so bad to the point where I would drive to the Shopper's in Virginia. It actually took less time. "Hold up, hold up, what you mean I can't buy these Newports with these food stamps?" While I sympathize with people who are less fortunate, I just don't have time to sit in line behind you while you scrape up change to supplement the balance on your WIC card. Ain't nobody got time for that! At Whole Foods, they've got that speed line where they call out your register number and you simply swipe and then you're freeeeeeee!
Yeah, but I think a lot of Whole Food shoppers are like Apple fanatics. Yes, they could purchase a PC and customize it so that it has 99.99999% of the functionality of an iMac. But some people just really dig that brand.
Giant doesn't have the cinnamon brooms and fresh flowers at the front of the store. Nor do they guarantee that a percentage of their proceeds will go towards fighting malaria, curing cancer, saving walruses, etc., etc. And they don't have the neat-looking tote bags with their insignia on it that sell for $40. And you can't buy the New Yorker in most of them. And their hot bar sells stuff like fried chicken and macaroni instead of exotic, healthy foods of Middle Eastern origin. And on top of that, the female shoppers at Giant are not as hot. And Giant doesn't have PBR stocked all over the store. And people go into Giant using their WIC cards. Don't gotta worry about that at Whole Paycheck!
Well, I doubt you can buy the New Yorker at the WF around here, either! Maybe, I haven't been in one in a while.
Speaking of tote bags, I was in a Hy-Vee in Omaha and bought a tote bag for $2 with the U of Nebraska football schedule and logo on it.
In Baltimore, maybe. I think a poor person would have a difficult time getting to most Whole Food locations in DC.
Giant got so bad to the point where I would drive to the Shopper's in Virginia. It actually took less time. "Hold up, hold up, what you mean I can't buy these Newports with these food stamps?" While I sympathize with people who are less fortunate, I just don't have time to sit in line behind you while you scrape up change to supplement the balance on your WIC card. Ain't nobody got time for that! At Whole Foods, they've got that speed line where they call out your register number and you simply swipe and then you're freeeeeeee!
Not for long, Whole Foods may be planning major expansion in D.C. apparently:
NEI posted one and I posted one. But other than that I cannot think of any in Boston proper. Maybe there are some in Cambridge and Somerville? I also wouldn't be surprised if there was eventually one in that Waterfront District that is being redeveloped, although downtown Boston was pretty lacking in full-service grocery stores when I lived there.
the answer is no, its not an effective test in any singular form for testing for urbanity though this type has increased in commonality since then 80K is huge for city sites though
So a question for the OP, there was a recent apartment development (includes a city target under it) but also has a Sprouts that was part of the complex but leveraged a historic rail shed for the supermarket with no apartments on top, would that not qualify
this premis was hilarious and self serving on nearly all accounts
Yes DC has a lot of this because of the types of things being built - most other cities have smaller lots so I guess they are not urban. A 400 ft tall building with a 20k target is now not urban, what a joke....
Yeah I guess so. Giant isn't Whole Food's but is still pretty expensive. It's not a discount store.
So the two Giant chains are more alike than different?
(Both of the chains that operate under the name Giant are owned by the same company, Ahold Delhaize, and both were owned by Royal Ahold before the Dutch company merged with the Belgian one. One is based in Landover, Md., and operates stores in the Washington-Baltimore area; the other, in Carlisle, Pa., and operates stores in Greater Philadelphia, South Central Pennsylvania, Southern New Jersey, and - as Martin's - in parts of Maryland. Before Ahold acquired Giant-Landover, the chain opened stores in South Jersey and the Pennsylvania suburbs of Philadelphia under the name "Super G" to avoid confusion. Those were all sold to other chains or closed; I don't think any of them became Giant-Carlisle stores.)
After skimming this thread, I'm kinda in kidphilly's camp in thinking this whole topic a bit absurd, and I'll provide an outlier example of why below. I can think of loads of dense, urbane districts with nary a supermarket to their name, or with conventionally developed ones (or close to it).
I can actually supply several of these here in Philadelphia, which made the top 5 of the two early lists.
Of the 11 supermarkets (two indies, five specialty - I consider Whole Foods, Sprouts, Trader Joe's and MOM's specialty grocers - and the rest regular chains) found in what the Center City District calls "Greater Center City":
Two are freestanding, single-floor stores with surface parking lots adjacent
One is a standard large-footprint store elevated one story above the street, with shops and parking below and on an upper deck next to the store
Two (the indies) are freestanding, smaller-format single-floor stores with no parking
One (the aforementioned Sprouts) is an adaptive reuse of an older building next to a new multistory apartment building with ground floor retail and tenant and shopper parking tucked behind it, below the apartment building's amenity deck
Two (one of the Whole Foods stores and an Acme, located across the street from each other) are single-floor stores with parking garages above; the Acme shares its building with a CVS drugstore
Three (the Trader Joe's, the second-largest Whole Foods in the Philadelphia market - 55k sf - and the first store of a new small-format urban concept from Giant (Carlisle) called Giant Heirloom Market) are stores located on the street floor of multistory apartment buildings. The TJ's has a surface parking lot to its north, and its sole entrance faces it; it's impossible to enter the store from its street-facing side. The Whole Foods has dedicated parking in a garage behind and beneath it. I don't believe the building with the Giant Heirloom Market has any parking at all
One (MOM's Organic Market) is a small-format store on the street floor of an office building that was reused as part of a larger mixed-use development that also contained two apartment towers and street-floor retail in its first phase. Parking is in an underground garage beneath one of the apartment towers
Meanwhile, one of the discounters - Aldi, a chain that has a standard floorplan and footprint for all of its stores, which are freestanding - has proposed building a store on the street floor of a multistory building with apartments above and a parking garage below on the main commercial thoroughfare of an outlying residential neighborhood that is less densely built than any of the neighborhoods of "Greater Center City." The store's neighbors are raising a stink about this building, citing parking, traffic, scale and architecture as problems (even though the Aldi store will have living walls on its exterior, the upper floors of this building are a bland gray box of a type you see lots of in American cities these days).
IMO this mix further reinforces kidphilly's claim that this whole subject is laughable and that street-floor apartments in mixed-use buildings are not a good measure of an area's urbanity.
However: when the Cordish Companies redeveloped a three-block chunk of Downtown Kansas City into a mixed-use entertainment district with offices (including H&R Block's new headquarters) and housing, it went to the trouble of making a large supermarket one of its first businesses to open on the grounds that without it, the apartment towers it was going to build would be harder to rent. That supermarket is on the street floor of a multistory building with parking, a gym and the amenity deck of the apartment tower next door above.
So it does seem that supermarkets are seen as a must-have amenity for a mixed-use dense urban district.
These are five of the 11 markets I mentioned in my post immediately preceding this one. The sixth (Spruce Food Market) I don't count as a supermarket; it's IMO a large corner grocer - and it's on the street floor of a parking garage entered from the street at the building's rear.
This city, not unlike Boston and Washington, has a lot of low-rise density that this metric doesn't really capture well.
And while I'm at it, Washington, DC, has almost as many freestanding one-floor supermarkets with parking out front in its core as it does supermarkets on the street floors of multistory buildings. Those latter stores are of more recent origin.
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