The Neighborhood Supermarket Never Disappeared

The less visible perseverance of a once-universal retail form

I was in Discourse Magazine last week with a piece on neighborhood supermarkets: small but modern supermarkets, 8,000-12,000 square feet, often in town or city locations. These were common in small towns and city neighborhoods up until the 1970s, roughly—some were still opening in the 1960s. Basically, at one time, they were simply supermarkets. But the…