Do places like Manhattan have walmart supercenters, giant department stores, shopping malls or supermarkets like Kroger? I would assume with the real estate market the way it is it would be hard to buy entire blocks just to put up a walmart when you can put up a walmart in a small town, charge roughly the same for products and spend 1/5th on real estate costs. The stereotype has always been that densely populated places like Manhattan have a bunch of tiny shops instead of supercenters like smaller towns have.
The only densely populated town i’ve really looked at is Indianapolis, and they have shopping malls in the densely populated parts, but I didn’t see any supermarkets.
Nope, no Walmarts at all. Two or three malls that I can think of, one at Herald Square and the one that was destroyed at the WTC. There are two K-marts but they’re pretty ratty and small. We do have a few national chains that have bought large plots, usually the first or second stories of an office building in midtown–HMV, Best Buy, Circuit City, Home Depot, etc. Many of them are specially configured for us–smaller furniture, lots more stuff that appeals to black or Latino or gay tastes, more hip clothing (little polyester or stretch pants, etc.), lots of shelving and containers and space-saving ideas. Of course, if you want more traditional stores you can rent a car and get to northern Jersey or Lawn Guyland, which have them in abundance (although again they’d be smaller than you’d find in TX or someplace). The outer boros might have smallish versions of the major stores–there’s a new Target in the Bronx and a Costco’s in Queens.
However, department stores we got. We have or had the flagships of such major chains as Lord & Taylor’s, Wanamakers, Macys, Bloomingdale’s, Altman’s, etc. Many of them have block-long buildings of grand design–doubtless you’ve seen Macys in Herald Square during the Turkey Day parades. The Ladie’s Mile on Sixth Avenue started the whole trend, and in fact my gym is in the remains of one at 20th Street. I do my treadmill amidst giant 1900 vintage Corinthian columns and a tin ceiling.
Traditional strip malls and giant one-story stores, though? Not really. And I don’t think we really want them.
Mehitabel nudges towards the point - there’s a different market, so there’s a different product. Nobody will buy three crates of bottled water if they’re not taking it home in a car. On the other hand, if you’re in a densely-populated city, you’re passing shops every time you walk down the street. When living in a city, I’d just buy what I needed when I passed a shop, never more than I could carry onto the bus. The demographics are different - you’re less likely to have people shopping for families, or elderly people, etc.
Whether the shops are the same companies or different ones depends on how the companies position themselves - recently, the UK supermarkets have targeted inner-city locations, using fairly small locations but making them work well (as they don’t need to have crates of bottled water on the shelves, they don’t need as much space, and there’s longer productive opening hours, a more available and flexible workforce etc).
Here’s a nice little page on the various Ladies’ Miles throughout the years in NYC. They’ve moved uptown.
My gym’s in the old Simpson, Crawford, and Simpson building with ‘SCS’ still in the pillars. The grand old Siegal Cooper building has been restored and has, in a fine example of recycling, a Bed, Bath, and Beyond in its first story and a Filene’s and TJ Maxx sharing second one, up two escalators that replace the grand staircase. The Hugh O’Neill building has a large Barnes and Noble on its first floor. So, what goes around comes around.
Here’s a nice little page on the various Ladies’ Miles throughout the years in NYC. They’ve moved uptown.
My gym’s in the old Simpson, Crawford, and Simpson building with ‘SCS’ still in the pillars. The grand old Siegal Cooper building has been restored and has, in a fine example of recycling, a Bed, Bath, and Beyond in its first story and a Filene’s and TJ Maxx sharing second one, up two escalators that replace the grand staircase. The Hugh O’Neill building has a large Barnes and Noble on its first floor. So, what goes around comes around.
And oh yeah, we have supermarkets. But the aisles are very very narrow and we even have special cute mini-shopping carts for them! There a very few large stores in hitherto-unused spaces, like that under the approach to the 59th Street Bridge. There’s a picture of the interior near the bottom of the page.
I grew up in Queens, and when I was a kid, you there were LOTS of supermarkets, but you never saw the big warehouse-type chain stores (Home Depot, Walmart, etc.).
But when I visit New York now, I see more and more of these big chain stores moving in and setting up shop along major boulevards. In some ways, New York City was the last frontier in the U.S. for such stores, and they’re gradually creeping in and making their presence felt in a big way.
Near where I live in Los Angeles, Walmart renovated an old 1930’s or 40’s three-story (or maybe four) department store and opened it up. It’s pretty near downtown LA, in a densely populated area. It’s really big, and attached to a big mall. Target opened a big store right in the middle or West Hollywood also- it’s really big. There are big Targets and things like Bed Bath and Beyonds around here, in very buit-up areas of LA. Some of them are two stories so they can still have massive square footage, but the Walmart is the biggest.
Manhattan is really the only major city I’ve ever been in (counting Manhattan as its own city) that seemed to lack true malls or superstores. Most other big cities have accomodated them in the downtown area.
Ffffft. They existed in suburban London decades ago (well, two decades). And in Manchester, purely for a 15ft change in height (cheaper than building lifts, I guess).
Downtown Philly has a Kmart (small by Kmart standards) and Strawbridge’s department store in “The Gallery”, one of the first urban malls in America. The only “super” markets are specialty places like Whole Foods and Trader Joes.
We do have a number of traditional supermarkets, Walmarts, Targets, Lowes, Home Depots, etc. but while they are in Philadelphia, they are usually located pretty far outside Center City proper. The closest ones are in South Philly. FWIW, I usually have a choice of at least three stores where I can buy whatever I need, but all are a minimum of 15-20min. away.
Densely populated San Francisco has supermarkets and malls. parking’s a bit sparse, though, and they’re less sprawled out than their suburban counterparts. Department stores, too.
There’s a Wal-Mart in downtown DC (11th and New York Ave. NW). Not as big as the ones out in the burbs, though, and parking is a problem for big stores inside the District. I think there are some “box”-type shopping centers in Northeast with lots of parking, but most of them are just inside the District line. An exception is the one near the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station. Most of the shopping malls inside Northwest DC (Georgetown Park, Mazza Gallery) are small, pricey, and have inadequate parking.
Lots of huge shopping centers just outside DC, though.
Tokyo has supermarkets, but not as large as typical suburban American ones. Usually they’re on the basement floor of department stores. And since most people shopping there came on foot or by mass transit, they tend to be designed around shoppers making relatively small purchases.
The really big stores, like Costco and Carrefour are out in the suburbs, but even those are usually in narrower, multi-story buildings.
Thats what I was thinking. Here in the midwest the vast majority of people who go to supermarkets end up with 5-6+ grocery bags of stuff, so I assume the markets in cities are designed differently.
AFAIK Cleveland doesn’t have any sort of Wal Mart, K-Mart or supermarket in the downtown area. But Cleveland’s downtown isn’t exactly “densely populated” either.
We do have 2 malls - one called the Galleria which was a grand idea but no one can actually afford to shop there, and the other is Tower City inside the Terminal Tower which is an ok place to shop if you must shop downtown.
Singapore is very densely-populated. It has the most enormous shopping malls, sometimes underground and multistorey. It has large bulk-buy stores, but supermarkets aren’t as ubiquituous as in other cities.
London is also heavily populated, but it has far fewer shopping malls. The prevailing shopping experience is the “high street”–a handful of streets, centrally-located, crowded with hole-in-the-wall style shops. In addition to these, convenience stores are dotted everywhere. There are department stores and large supermarkets, but large shopping complexes (i.e. a labyrinth of stores under one shared roof) are quite uncommon.
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