The grocery store on San Jose's Oakland Road had been dying for months. The chips-and-beverage aisle looked like a ghost-town main street. The sign on the wall — "PW Market, serving Santa Clara Valley since 1943" — read like a cruel joke up above empty coolers and a lingering memory of meat. And only a few shoppers were left to wander aimlessly, picking at this carcass of family-owned Americana.
Across town at the giant Target on Coleman Avenue, a newly expanded fresh-food section glistens at the end of a main aisle employees call "the raceway." Framed by a hillock of bananas and a glassed-in wall of milk, Kristie Wallingford of Santa Clara applauds the addition of avocados and grab-and-go meals. "It was nice when they did the grocery thing," says the 40-year-old mother of two. "You can hit groceries and all the other stuff now in one place."
From the supercenter to the mom-and-pop, America's grocery-shopping landscape is undergoing a historic and turbulent shift. Experts see what's happening in this traditionally low-margin, high-volume cutthroat business as a collective reworking of our food culture.
"This era's experiencing more rapid change, with both loss and opportunity, than I've ever seen before," says Nanci Klein with San Jose's Office of Economic Development. "Beyond the demographic changes already in play, the economic maelstrom is accelerating those trends. It seems like every retailer is either under pressure of failing or is thriving and expanding."
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Photo by Dai Sugano, San Jose Mercury News