Well, there is a Shop-Rite in Highland Park (Raritan and Fourth?). That’s bike-able. But with the “Farmer’s Market” (that’s it’s name) and George Street Co-op, you can get by without a supermarket. (not that you were saying otherwise)
I’ll confess to finding this thread both enlightening and a bit puzzling in the relative low frequency of supermarkets and hypermarkets in the places mentioned. This started me counting the numbers where I live.
By most standards I live in a small city of just under 200,000 in Western Canada. As I’ve been reading this thread, I started counting supermarkets and superstores here. I may not even have them all, but here goes:
3 Sobey’s - large supermarkets
3 Safeways - large supermarkets
4 Safeways - slightly smaller
5 Extra Foods - large super markets
2 Co-op - supermarkets
2 Real Canadian Superstores - supermarket/superstore
totalling 19 more or less allowing for the fact that I may have missed one or so.
Over and above this are some smaller neighbourhood and specialty grocery stores and the Walmarts that include about 5 or 6 aisles of groceries including a frozen foods/refrigerated aisle.
Old-ish thread, I know.
I’m currently teaching an undergraduate class on the postwar American city, focusing on issues like suburbanization and changing patterns of residence and consumption.
One of the books i set for my class is Lizabeth Cohen’s fine work, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage 2003). Much of Cohen’s examination of postwar changes in the balance between city center and periphery, between urban and suburban, actually uses New Jersey as a case study. While she doesn’t specifically answer the question posed by the OP, this is a quote from page 288:
This may come as something of a surprise to you, but Detroit is not Woodlake or Visalia. It is a completely different city.
I’ve never quite understood the mentality that says “Well, what you describe does not fit within my own narrowly-circumscribed experience, so you must be talking bullshit.” Maybe a little humility would lead you to realize that your experience is not universal, and that you can’t necessarily extrapolate from your experience to draw conclusions about very different times, peoples, or places.
Just found some more stuff. First, from a New York times story from 1982, about proposed development of the Mulberry Street area of downtown, which would involve pushing local merchants out to make way for new office towers, the Gateway complexes.
The last paragraph of the article states:
And the gold mine, from a 1986 New York Times article about the ousting of Mayor Kenneth Gibson:
No links, obviously. Articles found using ProQuest Historical Newspapers database.
This is a ridiculous nitpick, but as far as I know, from living here and doing a little extra searching, there are no major bookstores in Jersey City. A few small mom-n-pop types and one small one in the mall, that’s it. There is one next to the train terminal in Hoboken, which is easily accessible from Jersey City. Silly nitpick, I know, but it was bothering me.
Is one of them the Super K on Telegraph Road, just south of 8 Mile? I’ve never been in there, but the parking lot is always packed full. In general, Detroit has a huge problem with lack of shopping. Everything is in the suburbs. Mostly it’s just the effects of poverty, but the city also has high tax rates which tend to discourage new investment.
I don’t know about Detroit, but camden NJ seems utterly devoid of anything in the way of shopping and services. It must be very difficult to live in such areas-if you have no access to transportation.
The Barnes & Noble store locator lists one at:
Newport Centre #A-45
30-145 Mall Drive West
Jersey City, NJ 07310
From the map, this looks to be in Jersey City proper.
That’s the one I mentioned in the mall. It’s not a real B&N but a B. Dalton. It’s tiny and ill-equipped. Like I said it was a silly nitpick, but it got me excited that I might be living nearer to a big bookstore than I thought.
OK, if you want to play that game… 
How about the B&N store in Hoboken, which is listed at a massive 1.29 miles away. That’s half the distance to my neighborhood B&N!
And there are two others listed within 10 miles. How spoiled are you Jerseyites?
Well the Wikipedia defines a supermarket as:
A supermarket is a departmentalized self-service store offering a wide variety of food and household merchandise. It is larger in size and has a wider selection than a traditional grocery store and it is smaller than a hypermarket.
I think part of it might have to do that Newark is 26 sq miles and has a very high population density. Other cities like Jersey City are similarly small and highly dense. So perhaps maybe peolpe can go short distances to other less dense cities and shop. If you compare to cities with large areas like Jacksonville, Los Angeles and Phoenix, you will find bigger populations but much lower density.
Please reread my original post on this matter. You are not contradicting anything I’ve said already. I’m also curious as to where this 1.29 miles comes from, where the starting point is. JC is fairly large city. I didn’t mean to start a silly hijack.