[battery_glasses]

This underscores how important small businesses are to the health of a city.

I live a in less walkable neighborhood on this map - but about a year ago a small (tiny really, ~700sqft) corner store opened up 2 blocks from me. It sells coffee, pastry, simple sandwiches, but also pantry staples (flour, sugar, milk etc.) and has a really good beer and wine selection.

I can't do my normal grocery shopping there, but being able to walk 2 minutes to get coffee or a quick breakfast or that missing stick of butter for a recipe has been such a wonderful change to the neighborhood. (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.) They also host food trucks several days a week so its almost like having a restaurant in the neighborhood too.

All it took was 1 little store, owned and operated by a couple who lives in the neighborhood, to turn a 20 minute neighborhood into a 5 minute neighborhood for several thousand people.

[kneebonian]

Shame we decided to shutter all those down across the country, for an extended period because they were deemed "non-essential", leading to many of them to shutter forever. At the same time massive mega-corps were able to be deemed essential, and allowed to continue to operate, turning record profits.

But of course that's just conspiracy theory thinking and only someone who hates grandma would say something like that.

[vkou]

> Shame we decided to shutter all those down across the country, for an extended period because they were deemed "non-essential", leading to many of them to shutter forever.

This meme needs to die already.

A lot of those businesses shut down in 2020.

It's 2023 now, we haven't had any COVID restrictions for 2 years, and all the ones that have gone away... Have long since been replaced with equivalents. Some of whom have also shut down, and have been replaced with equivalents.

Restaurants and coffee shops die and open all the time. 2020 was rough, but in the long term, the net impact on my neighborhood has been ~zero.

You know where they have been dying and not re-opening? Downtown, because half their former patrons are now WFH and don't go into the office anymore. Unfortunately, that's a little harder to blame on COVID shutdowns.

[Retric]

Many cities never closed those during the pandemic. So it was really a local decision.

[irrational]

Not everything closed during the past few years because of restrictions. There was a chocolate shop that we loved going to for date night. All the locations closed during the pandemic AFTER they had been reopened for months because the parent company was bought out by a venture capital firm who only wanted the chocolate production part of the business (for selling to high end grocery stores) and didn’t want the retail stores.

[silisili]

I lived in a neighborhood like this too, and it was fantastic. I hated the city, but loved where I lived. I've been wishing to find something like it ever since, but it was a very old neighborhood and everything now seems to be planned, isolated communities.

We need zoning revamped, and you'd see a lot more of this.

[marssaxman]

This is why Euclidean zoning needs to die.

[greesil]

Manifold zoning is definitely better in principle, but it's hard to compare neighborhoods that are farther apart.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

> (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.)

Why not fix that? Submit it to OSM, Apple Maps, or Google Maps or all three.

[battery_glasses]

It shows up on all 3, I think it might be a labeling issue. My guess is that its a classified as a "convenience store", but in reality its closer to a coffeeshop and bottleshop that sells pantry items.

[tiffanyh]

7-11 or CVS/Walgreens fills this void in a lot of US geographies.

They aren’t as personalized or localized as the neighborhood place, but the use case you describe is exactly the market 7-11/CVS/Walgreens is going after.

[kweingar]

> This underscores how important small businesses are to the health of a city.

In this case it wasn’t the size of the business but rather the size/location of the physical store that mattered.

[rubidium]

Would you mind naming the shop and location? I’ve been tossing a similar idea around and would love to contact the owners to learn from them.