THROUGHOUT MOST OF the twentieth century, modernism and socialism tried to eliminate home cooking and home dining. Their reasons were different. The modernist argument was technical: Modern technologies, it was then assumed, need mass production to deliver economies of scale. When applied to food processing, the logic of industrial modernity suggests that bread production, for example, should be centralized in a single facility, supplying countless identical loaves to markets near and far. Sixty years ago, transportation was predicted to soon cost close to nothing, and processed food was meant to keep, basically, forever: “Best before” dates are a postmodern invention.
For socialist humanists, eliminating home cooking would liberate women from domestic labor. For more radical ideologues, communal dining in refectories or canteens could help undermine the fabric of the traditional, cellular family and challenge its patriarchal values. Yes, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky invented the Frankfurt kitchen (1926), but many at the time would have seen Taylorized home cooking as a transition toward the fully mechanized nutrition cycle of the forthcoming collectivist society; the Narkomfin Building (1930) in Moscow, like the Isokon (1934) in London, had communal kitchens and collective dining spaces (although the Isokon originally also had old-school “dumb waiters” to deliver food from a basement kitchen to the apartments, so meals could be prepared collectively but consumed privately).
Influential at times, the modernist-socialist two-pronged campaign against home-cooked food appears to have been only moderately successful over the long term. Today many who can afford it like to eat out, but regular communal dining is limited, as it often was, to boarding schools, convents, the army, and offbeat social experiments. Hotels have long favored room service over dining halls, and most apartments still have fully equipped kitchens, which suggests at least the expectation that residents will have the time to cook, and access to groceries. And as we all know—including, prominently, the mayor of New York City—therein lies the problem. Yes, there is food—in most of the Americas, at least—but regardless of price and quality, there is nowhere to buy it. We are not low on groceries; we are low on grocery stores.
I GREW UP IN A POORER COUNTRY where, since the rise of guild-run city-states at the end of the Middle Ages and until very recently, some food was always assumed to be within walking distance from where most people lived. I didn’t know about “food deserts” until I got my first job in the US and discovered that I needed to buy a car and drive long distances in order to feed myself. Far away in place and time, I need my memory, and Google Maps, to reconstruct the metrics underpinning the retail infrastructure of my Piedmontese hometown in the late 1960s and early 1970: a small provincial capital which I realize, retrospectively, embodied the letter, if not the spirit, of urbanist Carlo Moreno’s much more recent and controversial project of a ville du quart d’heure (a fifteen-minute, carless city where most residents can find all they need within a few blocks from their homes).
One of the main attractions, ensconced in a medieval arcade next to the old town hall, was a palatial cheesemonger that looked like a jewelry shop, boasting a richly decorated, three-bay storefront and a shiny showroom displaying stacks of giant wheels of Parmesan and Emmental.
Indeed, as far as I can remember, daily errands in those days were so quick and easy that they were often handed over to kids—me included. To get to the main grocery store I just had to cross the road. That’s where we would get ham and cheese, primarily, but also cleaning products, pantry staples, canned food, butter, rice, cookies, and candies. The butcher, around the corner, was not allowed to sell cured meats but famously did, purportedly sourcing it from his own farm. The greengrocer was one block over, next to an ice cream parlor, a barber, and an undertaker’s. I had to walk one more block for the baker’s, the pharmacy, the stationery store, the newspaper kiosk, and a wine store I never actually set foot in. Milk was delivered fresh (but pasteurized) in glass bottles; there was a café nearby, but there were no restaurants in the neighborhood—and only a handful elsewhere in town, strictly for celebrations, weddings, birthdays, or anniversaries. Refrigerators already included a small freezer—a cramped, boxy afterthought appended or bolted to the refrigerator’s upper corner—but mostly for ice cube trays, as frozen food was yet to come.
It was a neighborhood of recent build, composed entirely of four- to six-story apartment blocks arranged around paved courtyards, used for parking or garages. Based on an estimated density of around fifteen thousand inhabitants per square kilometer (forty thousand per square mile), each of the stores I just mentioned would have had a catchment (or primary trade) area of six hundred to nine hundred residents. That’s more or less the benchmark that the NYC Department of Planning targeted in a recent report, when prorated for similarly sized corner stores. (The report also noted that most areas in New York City do not reach that threshold and that more grocery stores would have to be built, regardless of footprint.) The stores I remember from my hometown circa 1970 were not convenience stores but all-purpose stores, or specialty stores in a much more fragmented market; the general retail metrics I just tried to figure out appear otherwise to have been very similar to those of today’s Manhattan.
And just like Manhattanites today, my parents were not entirely dependent on proximity stores. They would occasionally go “downtown”—meaning, to the central market square and its surrounding upscale retail areas—when they wanted something special. One of the main attractions, ensconced in a medieval arcade next to the old town hall, was a palatial cheesemonger that looked like a jewelry shop, boasting a richly decorated, three-bay storefront and a shiny showroom displaying stacks of giant wheels of Parmesan and Emmental.
But “downtown” was not a place my parents would drive to. For a start, there would have been nowhere to park even the small cars of the time, and “downtown” was rarely more than half a mile from where most people lived. That logistical constraint also crucially limited the size and weight of all purchases, which would have to be carried in handbags. That was in keeping with the etymology of the term retail, which used to mean cutting in smaller and smaller pieces (from the French re-tailler): originally pieces of cloth, in this instance of cheese.
Such was the Edenic state of modern retail before the advent of supermarkets. The first in my hometown opened, with grand fanfare, around 1968, and it was in the format and style of what today we would call a midsize urban market, albeit a bit smaller (around ten thousand square feet): It was downtown, it had no parking, and one didn’t go there to save money but to find imports, branded food, and rare treats. That’s where, circa 1975, I first bought a small, oval-shaped, blue-colored cardboard box of Caprice des Dieux (trademarked industrial cheese similar to traditional Camembert): I found it very bad on that occasion, and I still do. In the spirit of the time, that supermarket did not have counters for custom orders; everything was prepackaged and shown on shelves. The venue was popular for a while; then it all fell apart.
IN THE LATE 1970S LOCAL RETAIL started to go suburban, and urban grocery stores were among the first casualties of decentralization. Today, I am told, residents drive out of town to superstores or hypermarkets, owned by international chains, for most of their grocery needs; and if the old downtown has not yet been turned into the European equivalent of a food desert, that’s only due to some small outlets owned by the same chains (with “express” or “city” added to their names).
This is how the permanent modernist quest for economies of scale finally liquidated a venerable tradition of pedestrian life and proximity shopping. Bigger stores mean larger inventories at lower unit costs for retailers; for customers that means greater choice and fewer, longer, mechanized errands for bigger purchases that must then be kept and stored at home for days or weeks on end. But even taking those externalized costs into account, the shift to suburban shopping must have been overall cost effective, as—with different timelines for each country—it did in the end dismantle and replace local commerce.
Houellebecq himself once stated that, in a Monoprix store, he “feels at home.”
There is one important exception, however. In the rarefied, privileged enclaves of elegant urban life that survive in some European capitals, in parts of Manhattan, and now dawning in some Asian metropolises, downtown supermarkets like the one I remember from my hometown did not shut down but thrived, and often became enduring cultural references. That’s the world of the midsize urban market, or urban supermarket, also known in US trade lingo as “European urban,” of which Switzerland offers some remarkable examples.
Switzerland being a wealthy country, urban supermarkets—a premium retail format, for the reasons just mentioned—are to this day not limited to a few city centers but can be found all over the country, even in smaller towns, with a handful of big names running the show. The most important of all, Migros, founded in 1925 and since 1941 a federation of cooperatives, opened its first self-service grocery in the heart of Zurich in 1948. Migros is not only a retail giant, and the biggest private employer in Switzerland. It is a pillar, and an icon, of a certain Swiss German view of the world. The 15 Migros Theses (in the original German, Thesen, like the better known Ninety-Five written in Wittenberg in 1517), bequeathed by the visionary founder, Gottlieb Duttweiler, and his wife, Adele, still rule the life of the Migros cooperatives, dictating their ethical principles. The cooperatives cannot run profits beyond a certain threshold, and cannot pay dividends; until recently, Migros stores could not sell branded products, and to this day they don’t sell any tobacco or alcohol. (Migros beer is alcohol-free.) The competing chain, Coop, stronger in the French-speaking parts of the country, famously went in the opposite direction, starkly differentiating the two clienteles. Once I saw the minister of finance of the Swiss Confederation buying carrots and other vegetables in a Migros supermarket in central Basel. (Switzerland does not have ministries; the minister of finance is called the federal councilor heading the Department of Finance. Still, I was intrigued, so I asked, discreetly, a cashier if that really was Bundesrat So-and-So. Answer: He lives nearby.) On another occasion I saw the then pretender to the Italian throne (exiled) in the wine aisle of the Coop Eaux-Vives 2000 supermarket in Geneva.
In nearby Austria, Billa now has a ritzy flagship in central Vienna—much superior, in my opinion, to the pretentious Julius Meinl food hall nearby—yet most Billa convenience stores and midsize urban markets are still earthy and homey, even in Vienna. But the most culturally renowned of all European downtown supermarkets is the French chain Monoprix, practically a symbol of Paris’s intramural life (or life in the twenty arrondissements of central Paris), and a mainstay of the literary universe of the renowned and sulfuric French writer Michel Houellebecq.
Monoprix, now owned by venerable Saint-Étienne-based chain Casino, was founded in 1932 as a general department store, and its name, as the name of other brands like Uniprix and Prisunic, with which over time it merged, bears witness to the invention of “fixed price” retailing, often attributed to Boucicaut’s Bon Marché department store, or to Félix Potin for groceries. And while Monoprix still sells clothing, stationery, and various household goods, Monoprix for many Parisians means groceries—or, more often, single-serve, ready-to-eat meals. It is in this latter capacity that Monoprix often infuses the daily life of Houellebecq’s characters, from Michel Djerzinski’s barquette de loup au cerfeuil (tray of sea bass with chervil, in Les particules élémentaires, 1998) to Paul Raison’s tajine de volaille (Maghrebi-style poultry stew, in Anéantir, 2022). Houellebecq himself once stated that, in a Monoprix store, he “feels at home.”
Yet I suspect the best days of Monoprix may be behind us, due to the disappearance of the very socio-economic catchment area that Houellebecq so vividly described one generation ago. Today, the protagonists of Houellebecq’s earlier novels (middle-ranking functionaries, university researchers, young professionals) would not be able to afford rent in central Paris; they would likely be living in the suburbs and drive for groceries, once a week, to a Carrefour hypermarché. For those who still live in what the French call les beaux quartiers, LVMH (the world’s largest luxury conglomerate) now offers La Grande Épicerie de Paris, a refurbished food hall attached to the historic Bon Marché. When it was called, simply, l’Épicerie fine du Bon Marché, it was an elegant grocery in an upscale neighborhood where well-off residents went for their daily errands. Now it is so conspicuously opulent that many of those same residents find it off-putting—on purely aesthetic grounds. Prices, as far as I can tell, are not higher than they always were. It was neither shown nor mentioned so far in Emily in Paris (Eataly was, strangely), but that may still happen.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF the Channel, “Cool Britannia” urbanites first championed the chain Sainsbury’s, known anecdotally for having brought something resembling French baguettes to the UK general public. (The Sainsbury family is better known to architects for having commissioned seminal work by Norman Foster, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.) In the late 1990s, however, Sainsbury’s favored the development of suburban hypermarkets and urban superstores (urban supermarkets with vast parking lots), leaving London’s premium midsize urban markets to competitor Waitrose. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, with the British pound recovering and unlimited food imports from the European Union, Waitrose was cosmopolitan London’s equivalent of Paris’s Gallocentric Monoprix. Then Brexit, e-commerce, and Covid flipped the script.
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When the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the product mix offered by UK supermarkets shrank and became a marker of the ideological allegiances of each chain; some retailers made a point of replacing European imports with similar ones coming from non-EU countries (offering South African grapes in the spring rather than French grapes in the fall, for example). Regardless, by the end of the decade, many alert Londoners had long stopped walking the aisles of their local supermarket. These were the early adopters of pure-play online groceries, or e-groceries, of which the British start-up Ocado was the pioneer and flagbearer.
Launched in the late dot-com days, the company (now two companies, ocado.com, the actual retailer, and its parent, Ocado Group) chose from the start to do away with all brick-and-mortar storefronts, to be replaced by online ordering (from a website, then from apps), high-tech fulfillment centers, and a fleet of refrigerated delivery vans. In the late 2010s Ocado drew praise for its fully automated robotic warehouses, run by the proprietary technology it had developed, and which it started selling and licensing to supermarket chains around the world. When Covid came, Ocado’s market share, and market capitalization, skyrocketed (and Waitrose, the company’s long-standing supply partner, stepped out, to be replaced by Marks and Spencer).
Ocado’s vans continue to be ubiquitous on London’s streets; they are driven by uniformed workers—regular hires, with salaries, pensions, and benefits; the vans are GPS traceable, and they deliver in scheduled time slots. The minimum order is £40 ($55), but there are incentives for orders of more than £75 ($100): Ocado is for weekly deliveries, not for daily errands. A mini-Ocado service, based on the same logistics but with a lower spend threshold, called Ocado Zoom, does not appear to have caught on. But Ocado is not doing well: It has lost 85 percent of its market cap since its pandemic peak, and it is reportedly downsizing. Analysts think that Ocado is being outcompeted by micro deliveries, based on gig workers on electric bikes who shop on behalf of their clients at existing supermarkets. This is precisely the path that Manhattan appears to have chosen.
The choice is between technology and salaries on one side and the brutal exploitation of a subaltern and disenfranchised labor force on the other.
My New York address is close to a vast and cavernous Fairway grocery (at a glance, I would say forty thousand square feet), noted for its bafflingly vast range of exotic mineral waters and imported (mostly European) cookies. Nearby we have an Eataly—the first in the Americas when it opened, in the summer of 2010, and at the start primarily a grocery, whereas it is now primarily an eatery: a sad decline that I’ll bemoan on some other occasion. Since 2016, we’ve also had a small (about half the size of Fairway) Trader Joe’s at Thirty-Second and Third. But then, in quick postpandemic succession, we also got a supersized Whole Foods just north of Madison Square Park (54,000 square feet), a vast Wegmans flagship at Astor Place (88,000 square feet, not exactly at walking distance from Kips Bay but almost), and as of February of this year even a Lidl, the third in the city from the German discounter: another 20,000 square feet just opposite our well established and very popular Trader Joe’s.
Eataly Flatiron. Lauren Martin
This part of Manhattan definitely does not look like a food desert. Yet the recent surge of supermarket footprint, in particular, is puzzling. Are residents of Kips Bay and Murray Hill—many of them recent college graduates and young professionals—buying more food from supermarkets than they used to? One generation ago, Houellebecq’s urbanites in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris would have been walking to a local Monoprix to buy their barquettes of prepared meals, but today’s Manhattanites in the same starting-out crowd have their meals delivered from restaurants (real or virtual ones). So we must conclude that most of the recently created supermarket square footage in this part of Manhattan (and possibly elsewhere in New York City) is there to sell groceries, not take-away meals.
And groceries they do sell—only, no longer primarily to regular shoppers. A sizable slice of their clientele appears to consist of nonprofessional couriers, who pick up groceries to order, check out (increasingly from separated counters), and deliver their wares by electric bikes, store to door. As there are limits to what e-bikes can carry (practical limits, to be noted, not legal), this is last-mile logistics, but restricted to the micro delivery of daily errands, thus turning existing supermarkets into micro fulfillment centers, servicing fleets of gig-working e-bike riders, centrally managed by e-commerce platforms.
NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE—either economically, environmentally, socially, or urbanistically. There are groceries we must buy every day and there are household and pantry goods we can buy periodically and in bulk: When dealing with transportation, economies of scale still matter. The carbon footprint of an e-bike is certainly greater than that of a human-powered bike or of a deambulating human carrying a handbag; moreover, the environmental impact of twenty individual e-bike micro errands is also likely to be much higher than that of a single, cumulative delivery performed by an electric van. Bicycles, I mean the good old bikes, were a fantastic modern invention, but e-bikes are motor vehicles. The only reason why they are so popular today is that they are not regulated as such, and they are cheap because they are often equipped with substandard and dangerous batteries.
The horseshoe convergence between the otherwise incompatible worldviews of anarcho-capitalism and ethical populism is shaping our policies, our politics, and our world in general in much more nefarious ways. Yet, sticking to grocery stores, some practical, immediate, and matter-of-fact alternatives may not be unimaginable.
The bike infrastructure we started building in cities (in Europe, as of the early 1970s) was meant for human cyclists, not for powerful motor vehicles on two wheels. And e-bikes (not limited to couriers’ bikes) are conspicuously taking over places and spaces where they do not belong: subway cars, for example. Still or in motion, e-bikes are also colonizing the sidewalks, just like automobiles used to in their heyday. Micro deliveries are disrupting the management and operations of residential buildings, where lobbies were never designed and are not staffed to receive packages at all hours, and elevator capacity was calculated for different and less intense patterns of use. Last, but crucially, the gig economy in general is both a symptom and an amplifier of growing social inequalities. Regardless of pay and contract, driving an e-bike around the clock and in all weather in Manhattan traffic is not a job; it’s Russian roulette. E-bikers, constantly under the pressure of delivery times, put their life at stake at every intersection. Nobody should have to do that for a living.
Why, then, are micro deliveries so often seen as the future of urban groceries? One could argue that the rise of micro deliveries may bring new business to existing retailers (and restaurants), converting their current facilities into micro fulfillment centers at no cost, hence offering supermarkets a much-needed lifeline and hopefully avoiding the terminal Amazonification of the urban grocery landscape. But micro deliveries may just be reformatting an existing (and very rigid) market demand, rather than creating new business for stores; we are not talking of books and sweaters here, but of bread and butter.
Having your matcha latte carried to your doorstep every morning from a store three blocks away is a form of antisocial behavior.
A few weeks ago, I saw a delivery worker riding his e-bike in the aisle of a supermarket, deftly picking items with one hand while holding one side of the handlebar and his phone with the other. It was a virtuosic and exhilarating performance. I still think that an automated storage and retrieval system, of the kind currently used in Amazon warehouses or Ocado fulfillment centers around the world, could do a better, safer, faster, and cheaper job. Besides, the best tool for the urban delivery of groceries is not the bicycle, electric or not, but either the hand-carried mesh tote (filet à provision) or a van. Cargo e-bikes (or quadricycles: small electric vans on four wheels regulated as bicycles) are currently gaining ground, but they are in a legal limbo; and autonomous vehicles would not make any difference here, as we would still need—at least, for the time being—a human for the “last yard” delivery (from curb to doorstep). Hence the choice is between technology and salaries on one side and the brutal exploitation of a subaltern and disenfranchised labor force on the other.
If we appear to be choosing the latter, against all common sense, it’s because two different constituencies endorse and promote it. Libertarian ideologues by definition cherish every form of social Darwinism, so they like to see swarms of recent immigrants riding bikes for a pittance in a blizzard or scorching heat. And romantic progressives dislike automation, as a matter of principle, and they like to think we are offering at least that kind of job to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one. This horseshoe convergence between the otherwise incompatible worldviews of anarcho-capitalism and ethical populism is shaping our policies, our politics, and our world in general in much more nefarious ways. Yet, sticking to grocery stores, some practical, immediate, and matter-of-fact alternatives may not be unimaginable.
Micro deliveries may just be reformatting an existing (and very rigid) market demand, rather than creating new business for stores; we are not talking of books and sweaters here, but of bread and butter.
The mayor of New York City is planning to open a small network of municipal groceries in parts of Manhattan where food access is scarce: The first, announced in April, will be in East Harlem; a total of five are expected to open by the end of 2029. Critics have claimed that such city-owned markets tend to incur losses. That is I presume the plan, as the new groceries will offer a social service that would already exist if someone could run it at a profit. Following from the story I just told, here are a couple of modest proposals to help jump-start the new groceries and pay for their costs.
First, let the municipal markets serve the people, not e-commerce platforms. Access to municipal markets should be limited to shoppers buying food for themselves and their families. And to subsidize groceries, I would tax micro deliveries. I would tax them as such, above and beyond the regular tax on sales and deliveries (which is in fact zero for most groceries). I would not only tax micro deliveries, so they pay for their environmental costs; I would also regulate them strictly, so their prices would rise even further. Micro deliveries would then subsist, but in a limited form, and customers will use store-to-door services only when needed—as was already the case before the pandemic. If you are home alone, have the flu, and the fridge is empty, it is good to know that you can have your groceries—even your meals—delivered. But having your matcha latte carried to your doorstep every morning from a store three blocks away is a form of antisocial behavior, which inflicts a heavy toll on the public at large, and on the city. As a simple matter of social justice, I would tax that without mercy.