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Me at the brand New Jersey City ShopRite after putting up with terrible urban grocery stores for years.

Seriously this place is amazing. I know suburban grocery stores have already been like this for like 15 years but having something like this in the middle of downtown and connected to the light rail is amazing.

Walkable downtown grocery stores in the 20k-40k sq ft range are common in NJ, but almost invariably the 50k+ mega stores are out on highway strip malls. The reality is structured parking is expensive, and you need a remarkable dense neighborhood for a grocer to accept a low enough parking ratio.

Exciting that we’re getting a very transit-accessible TJ’s as well.

The ones in Journal Square seem to be about 10k sf

New Brunswick still cannot support a proper grocery store despite building probably thousands of units of new multifamily in the past 10-20 years.

It’s not just about people but purchasing power. Students on meal plans/living off of takeout are not exactly big spenders at grocery stores.

I don't think students are living in most of those multifamily buildings in New Brunswick. One of the towers was marketed as student lodgings, I believe, but most of them are for regular renters.

I think the major difference between New Brunswick and similarly dense places in Europe is that in Germany or the UK, there would be a lot of people in dense, low-rise housing within a mile or so without cars, who would bike/walk/ride a bus into “downtown” New Brunswick to shop. Whereas in…

Tesco/Sainsbury's/Carrefour/whatever are also more comfortable with varying the format. (And now Aldi too, but less so here.)

…New Brunswick, way more people have access to a car and just drives to a grocery store with a parking lot.

I wonder what calculations are different in Europe where it seems easier to get small neighborhood supermarkets

It’s that there are supply chains set up specializing in those small format urban stores. In the U.S. the big chains bypass the small store format completely. That being said you still have to head to the burbs in Europe for large format stores.