Okay, I’m from the Midwest and used to shopping in stand alone grocery stores. I know not every place is like that though.
I’ve been watching some amusing videos on YouTube showing apartments in NYC. I’d never be able to afford them but one can dream. Folks show you the neighborhood and there’s tons of restaurants, bookstores, department stores and so on, but I never see grocery stores. Delis and convenience stores, sometimes produce stalls, but no general groceries.
Am I watching wrong, and missing something? Where does on get regular groceries in NYC?
And yes, I am a hick from the sticks, but I’m happy.
But there are boutique merchants. For example, you can find lots of food at Chelsea Market but mostly artsy food things. Forget toilet paper and detergent.
Something’s funky with google maps. There are lots of grocery stories in on the east side, you have to manipulate the map and perform the search again, but they’re spread out throughout the areas on NYC that have residential housing. I found an article that claims 1100 grocery stores over 4000 sq ft in NYC.
When you don’t have a car or a lot of refrigerator space, you’re more likely just to pick up what you need for the next day or two from a corner bodega rather than fill up a cart at a grocery store.
I guess I can see how that would work. I lived in Chicago for a school year and had no car. So I shopped more often, for lesser amounts, because a couple of bags was about the most I could carry at once.
Is it possible that you just don’t recognize them? Generally speaking , from what I’ve seen supermarkets in Brooklyn and Queens are smaller than those in many other places and those in Manhattan are smaller still - and many of them do not have parking lots. So if you are looking for a giant supermarket surrounded by a sea of parking, you won’t find it in Manhattan. They are usually on the ground floor of an apartment building. Also, the chains are fairly local chains so you might not recognize the names.
My son is moving to Manhattan ( coincidentally to the same neighborhood my husband grew up in so I know the neighborhood) and here’s what I got on a search of the neighborhood.
Here are some photos of the Fairway Market just so you can see what it looks like.
I’ve never known anyone who does all their grocery shopping at a bodega or the equivalent. It would be like doing all the grocery shopping at a 7-11. I suppose the people I’ve heard of who don’t cook at all might buy a few food items there but mostly they are used for prepared foods or convenience.
It’s possible I didn’t recognize one, and I didn’t expect parking. I guess that even if there was a chain name it would have been wider than many of the storefronts I see. BTW, thanks for the pics.
Funny thing - in Green Acres Lisa Douglas, who would prefer to be in NYC, tells her husband Oliver in her Hungarian accent that she’s prepared a “shooping list”. He corrects her and tells her it’s a shopping list. then they get to the Hooterville General Store and Mr. Drucker asks her for her shooping list.
Err, that Google maps image is east of Central Park, not west. And I can assure you there are plenty of grocery stores on the west side as well. Key Food, D’Agostinos, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Target, Gristedes, Fairway, Pioneer, Morton Williams, Gourmet Garage, and a whole bunch of local independent ones as well are all within a short walking distance of my apt.
Not sure why the OP thinks there aren’t any grocery stores in Manhattan. They just don’t have parking lots. Most people don’t do grocery shopping at small bodegas, those are overpriced and they basically carry a tiny assortment of products and a lot of snack foods. They go to actual grocery stores.
In the time I’ve spent in downtown Seattle (mostly overnight stays when I’m going to concerts or comedy shows), the supermarkets tend to have underground parking and are quite compact compared to suburban locations - I just used Google Earth to compare a Safeway I’m familiar with in Lower Queen Anne to one here in Olympia, and the former is about 10,000 square feet to the latter’s 55,000, which is still nothing compared to the 90,000 at the store I work at or the 250,000 at the local Wal-Mart.
You could probably fit the downtown Safeway into Wal-Mart’s menswear department.
Considering that Manhattan is even denser than Seattle, I can only imagine how compact the grocery stores must be.
The larger grocery stores tend to be on several floors with most of it being underground. So it may not seem big from the outside but there’ll be two levels inside. But yeah generally the total floor space is way less than the typical suburban supermarket.
When I lived in NYC and walked to work, there were five supermarkets within a few blocks of my apartment. Often, on my way home from work, I’d stop at one of them (depending on the items I needed) and picked up whatever I could carry. No problem.
We have that in li’l ol’ Tempe, a Whole Foods taking up most of the ground floor of an apartment building. I would imagine there is another one or two in downtown Phoenix as well but the one pictured is the one I’ve been to.
There are plenty of supermarkets in Manhattan and elsewhere in NYC. As mentioned above, they almost never have parking lots. And even one I know in Brooklyn that does have a parking lot, few people use it because you would have to give up your hard-owned parking space to drive over and then you probably cannot find a new one closer to your apartment than the supermarket. Besides them, there are loads of greengrocers (mostly Korean owned) in Manhattan.
I work in lower Manhattan, and within a few blocks is a Gristedes, a Whole Foods, and a Target (off the top of my head). They, there’s also Eataly, which has a specialty grocery store, and a French specialty store, too.
There’s a Whole Foods on the south side of Union Square. Also Eataly, on the west side of Madison Square, is an upscale food retailer as well as a restaurant. The whole basement of the CNN building at Columbus Circle is a supermarket. I know this (been in them) and I live in a different country.
Just - if you are looking for Walmart-sized expansive supermarkets, for some reason (a number of reasons) those are not very common. But - the ones I mention above are fairly large by Manhattan retail space standards. First, Manhattan real estate is very expensive. (No shit, Sherlock!) Since there are no parking lots, everything is carried home unless someone is extravagant with taxis, so the customer base is more local and hence smaller, and each customer purchase will be smaller (but perhaps more frequent). The joke goes that a lot of people cook less and eat take-out or got restaurants more in Manhattan, so again, fewer groceries. Fewer people raising children in Manhattan, comparatively, so less groceries and less need to stay home (and cook). Smaller cramped (and expensive!!) apartments means smaller kitchens, less likely to have those double-door fridges and walk-in pantries, less counter space, less room to prepare complex meals - more incentive to buy take-out.
