The Grocery Store That Ate the City

The supermarket is so ordinary a feature of American life that it’s almost impossible to perceive as a historical event. But it was one. Between 1930 and 1970, the supermarket didn’t just change where Americans bought food — it restructured the physical and economic geography of cities in ways that are still being lived with, still being studied, and in many places still being reversed at enormous public cost.

The origin point is usually given as 1930, when Michael Cullen opened King Kullen in a former garage in Jamaica, Queens. The concept was simple and devastating to existing retail: enormous floor space, a full range of goods under one roof, low prices achieved through volume purchasing and self-service rather than clerks retrieving items from behind counters. By 1932, Cullen had eight stores and annual sales of roughly six million dollars. The grocery trade press, horrified, ran editorials warning that this model would destroy neighborhood retail. They were correct.

What the grocery trade press didn’t predict, because almost nobody was thinking about urban form at that level of detail in 1932, was the spatial logic that the supermarket would impose. Supermarkets required large floor plates and extensive parking. Large floor plates required cheap land. Cheap land was at the edge of cities, not at the center. The center had expensive, subdivided lots owned by many different parties, often encumbered with old leases and deed restrictions. The edge had fields and vacant lots that could be assembled cheaply. The supermarket’s economics pushed it outward, and as it moved outward, it pulled consumer traffic with it.

The mechanism is more specific than it usually gets described. In 1950s Baltimore, for instance, the construction of several large supermarkets along the new suburban corridors of Edmondson Avenue and Liberty Road didn’t just capture new suburban customers — it pulled purchasing power out of the row-house neighborhoods along those corridors, where corner groceries and small markets had served the same population. Those smaller stores couldn’t compete on price with chains that were buying in railroad-car quantities and operating on thin margins. They couldn’t compete on selection. They couldn’t offer parking lots. Between 1950 and 1970, roughly a third of Baltimore’s independent grocery stores closed. The closures left behind gaps in food access that weren’t uniformly distributed: they were concentrated in Black neighborhoods where supermarkets chose not to locate, calculating (correctly, from a pure real-estate standpoint) that the demographics didn’t support their preferred store format.

The term “food desert” entered the research literature in Scotland in the 1990s and crossed into American urban planning discourse around 2000. By the time it became a policy focus, the damage was decades old and layered into the physical fabric of cities in ways that were not easy to address. Supermarket chains had long since determined, through their own analysis, which zip codes were worth serving. The zip codes they avoided tended to be dense, low-income, and disproportionately minority. This was not (usually) a matter of explicit racial animus — it was the application of demographic and income metrics to site selection models. The effect was indistinguishable from discriminatory intent.

The economics of the supermarket format itself contributed to this pattern. A conventional supermarket in the 1990s needed roughly 30,000 to 45,000 square feet of floor space and a dedicated parking lot. Finding that configuration in an established dense urban neighborhood required either demolishing existing buildings or building something new, both of which cost far more than greenfield suburban development. The return on investment calculations consistently pointed away from the dense urban core.

What’s striking about this history is how thoroughly private investment decisions, made according to entirely rational internal logic, produced urban outcomes that required enormous public remediation later. The USDA’s 2009 estimate was that 23.5 million Americans lived more than a mile from a supermarket and didn’t own a car. That number represented, in part, the accumulated effect of five decades of location decisions made by a handful of grocery chains. The policy responses — USDA’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative, various state-level incentive programs, the celebrity of urban farming movements — cost public money to address problems created by private decisions that generated private profit.

It would be too simple to call this market failure. The supermarket chains were not violating any law. They were not even, by the standards of the time, acting irresponsibly. They were doing exactly what their shareholders expected: finding the most profitable locations and serving the customers most likely to generate margin. The failure, to the extent there was one, was in the regulatory and planning frameworks that allowed private retail decisions to have such large and unremediated public consequences.

The comparison with European grocery retail is instructive. In France, Germany, and the UK, the expansion of large-format retail in the 1970s and 1980s was substantially more restricted by planning law. France’s Loi Royer of 1973 required government approval for any retail development above a thousand square meters. The explicit goal was protecting small retailers; the incidental effect was preserving the mixed-use character of town centers and preventing the edge-city geography that American supermarket development produced. French supermarkets exist, and they’re large, but they never achieved quite the same degree of geographic concentration or the same degree of food-desert creation. The regulatory choice shaped the urban outcome.

The city of Philadelphia spent roughly $40 million in public subsidies between 2011 and 2019 trying to attract full-service grocery stores to underserved neighborhoods through the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative. It worked, partially. Stores opened in neighborhoods that had been without them for decades. Researchers found modest improvements in diet quality in areas where the stores located. But the research also found that simply opening a store didn’t transform eating habits in the ways the optimistic framings had suggested. Food access matters. It’s not the only variable.

What Philadelphia’s experience illustrated is that markets, once shaped, don’t unbend easily. The geographic pattern established between 1950 and 1975 became the baseline against which all subsequent decisions were made. Grocery chains looking at Philadelphia today still see the same neighborhood demographics, the same real-estate challenges, the same cost structures that made their predecessors avoid those areas. The subsidies change the calculation, but they don’t change the underlying logic that created the problem.

The more recent transformation in food retail — the expansion of dollar stores into low-income urban areas, the growth of online grocery delivery, the proliferation of small-format specialty stores — is not primarily a story about addressing food access gaps. Dollar stores in particular have been the subject of careful research showing that their entry into low-income neighborhoods does not substantially improve nutritional outcomes, because they stock processed and packaged goods rather than fresh produce and protein. They’re better than nothing as a caloric option. They’re not equivalent to a full-service grocery store.

Online grocery delivery raises its own spatial equity questions. The services that work well in dense, wealthy neighborhoods — Instacart, Amazon Fresh, and their competitors — tend to work poorly or not at all in the same low-income areas that lack physical stores. The delivery fee structures, minimum orders, and tip expectations create effective price floors that disadvantage lower-income customers. The technology that looks like a solution to grocery access problems turns out to have its own demographic logic.

There’s a deeper structural point here about how infrastructure decisions made for economic reasons become social facts that persist long after the original economic logic has shifted. The supermarket chains that shaped American urban geography in the mid-20th century did so because the economics of that moment favored suburban development. Many of those same chains have since struggled financially as the suburban market saturated and as online competition eroded margins. Several major players — A&P, Winn-Dixie, Pathmark — went bankrupt. The stores closed or were acquired. The geographic patterns they created persisted.

Buildings last longer than business models. Parking lots outlast the cars they were built for. The decision to build supermarkets at the edge of American cities in 1955 is still structuring where people can buy food in 2029. That’s how infrastructure works, and why infrastructure decisions are not merely economic decisions but something closer to constitutional ones — choices that constrain the choices available to people for generations.

The lesson is not that supermarkets were a mistake. They produced genuine benefits: lower food prices, wider selection, improved cold-chain management, reduced spoilage, and the ability to feed a much larger urban population with less labor. The lesson is that the form in which those benefits were delivered — the specific spatial and economic configuration — was not inevitable. It was a choice, or a series of choices, that happened to align with the regulatory environment and economic incentives of a particular historical moment. Different choices, under different regulatory frameworks, produced meaningfully different outcomes in European cities.

Understanding this as a historical and structural problem rather than a residual problem of individual poverty is what makes the food desert frame worth keeping, despite its critics. The desert wasn’t natural. It was built.