> But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.
I feel that the American view of a grocery store is one of those mega-Walmartesque stores with infinite aisles of stuff, rather than the more common small-scale grocery stores we are used to here in Europe.
At least on my trips to the US I don't recall seeing many small-scale grocers in neighbourhoods, it was either stores like CVS or going to a mega-grocer.
Those large stores are where most people buy food. The margins for food in them are very low, but they make it up by volume. Smaller stores cannot compete on price or selection, and so even if there is a small store close Americans will make regular trips to the large store that has everything at a low price for most food. There isn't much room for the small stores anymore.
There are pros and cons to the above. Do not claim what you are used to is better: it is different, not better or worse. Odds are you have not spent enough time using both to make a real claim. even if you have, odds are your stage of life is different enough that you cannot compare.
Many urban areas in the US all have lots of local, smaller, specialty, and neighborhood grocery stores. It's not a novelty for those who live in those areas. And they're not 7-11s.
In the US you don't really have the urban Tescos and Sainsbury's and so forth. You have some equivalent local markets but it's mostly fairly spread out supermarkets or 7-11/CVS/etc. which really don't count as grocery stores.
I feel that the American view of a grocery store is one of those mega-Walmartesque stores with infinite aisles of stuff, rather than the more common small-scale grocery stores we are used to here in Europe.
At least on my trips to the US I don't recall seeing many small-scale grocers in neighbourhoods, it was either stores like CVS or going to a mega-grocer.