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By Erik Hare

The local grocery store is more than just a place to pick up dinner.  It’s also where you might run into neighbors and exchange gossip or news, perhaps even learning a few things that are going on.  That role as a center of the community hasn’t changed for thousands of years.  The ancient Greek “agora” was full of people buying their daily food and just chatting or, if their name was Plato or Socrates, inventing Western Civilization.  This was, however, before laws against loitering.

The modern grocery store or “supermarket” as we’ve come to know it is in some trouble.  A 2006 survey for Food Processing Magazine found that only 52% of all food sales came from traditional food retailers, and this may drop as low as 40% by 2014.  Who’s taking up the sales?  Large “supercenters” such as Target and Wal*Mart are moving into the field aggressively, knowing that while food has low margins it gets people back into the store at least once a week.  It’s the loyalty that they hope to play off of, not the community center.

Still, you can tell a lot about a neighborhood by the kind of food stores it has.  Despite everything, there are only three basic types:

Traditional “grocery”stores of less than about 40,000 sq feet or so make up the bulk of what you’ll find in the middle of neighborhoods.  Some of these are “ethnic” stores that cater to a specific cuisine or diet, some are upscale in price and quality.  A large number of these means you are looking at a stable neighborhood that values its institutions.  You can rely on places like this for news.

“Supermarket” stores are larger than Traditional markets, although the term is often used broadly to describe any self-service food store.  At one of these stores you will see a much larger selection and a parking lot big enough to accommodate an entire region’s worth of traffic.  In the Twin Cities, the most common ones are Rainbow and Cub Foods.  These are not neighborhood stores, and a neighborhood that relies on one of these will need to have another place for news and gossip.

Adventure stores are the latest trend, with Trader Joe’s being the most well known.  The idea is that they keep people away from larger “supercenters” by offering highly unique products and experiences.  These kinds of store can be neighborhood centered or not, you’ll have to visit them to see.

Saint Paul still has dozens of smaller “grocery” sized stores around built around the traditional model, but more and more ethnic varieties all the time.  These are springing up to serve new populations that have different needs than the usual larger stores can serve.  No matter what the nature of these smaller stores, each is the center of one type of community as it is known to the people who shop there.

The best way to find out about a neighborhood as a casual observer is to make a note of the kind of grocery stores and spend some time in which ever one seems the busiest.  A shopping cart is a peek inside someone’s life if you really want to be nosy about it.  I often recommend to people who are interested in a particular neighborhood that they check out the grocery stores first and pick up some of the dirt; it doesn’t matter what you hear, just so long as you hear it. 

A neighborhood where people talk is a neighborhood where you can stay connected.  That’s what really matters when looking for a place that you can stake your claim for the long haul.