types of supermarkets

Earlier today, I visited Sprouts Farmers Market¹¹ Wikipedia tells me there is controversy over whether it is a real farmers market. I do not care particularly much either way, but will be shortening it to Sprouts in the rest of this post nonetheless. for the first time. Back when I lived in Portland I used to frequent Safeway, for it was only a couple blocks away from my apartment. But now the Safeway is a whole mile away, which makes it somewhat inconvenient to walk to. And it is really nice having a grocery store I can go to without needing to convince one of my roommates to drive me. So I decided to check out Sprouts.

As I reported on my Sprouts investigation to a Discord group chat, I unwittingly triggered a heated argument:

I, of course, needed to launch an investigation to figure out which of these two theories was more accurate. Thankfully, it is really easy and simple to get arbitrary charts created quickly nowadays: large language models are very good at interviewing other large language models for their impressions of various grocery stores. Thus, we have the following chart:

The four ontologically basic²² According to me axes that supermarkets can vary on, I have discovered through incredibly thorough empirical investigation, are:

• “Full-service fresh” vs. “Warehouse”

  • Draeger’s, Bristol Farms, and Uwajimaya vs. Aldi, Grocery Outlet, and WinCo

• “Crunchy” vs. “ethnic”

  • PCC and New Seasons vs. Seafood City andEl Super

• High vs. low “corporate infrastructure”

  • Fred Meyer, Walmart, Safeway, and Ralphs vs. Berkeley Bowl, Rainbow, and small Asian markets

• “Stock-up size” vs. “hip small-format”

  • Walmart and WinCo vs. Trader Joe’s, Nijiya, and Erewhon

Despite my full faith in this analysis, I’m not sure I understand why “full-service fresh” vs. “warehouse” is the primary factor here. I’m not sure I’ve ever been to an Aldi, much less any of those other places. Maybe by inspecting some images on Google we can internalize the vibes distinction:

Staring at these images hasn’t helped me very much. I am not sure how much the analytical work we are doing here tracks anything like the mental categories that people tend to slot grocery stores into in their head. When I look around at the chart some of the clusters do make a little sense? And I suppose the other three axes speak to me a little. So probably it’s just me who has a strange failure to grasp the all-important full-service fresh / warehouse dichotomy³³ Perhaps after my previous mysterious warehouse job, I need to find a mysterious full-service fresh job? If any mysterious full-service fresh employers are interested in hiring me, please let me know. I hope to have a “hire me” page up on apriiori.com soon..

Anyways. While Natural Grocers and Sprouts are kinda close together:

it turns out that Sprouts is basically exactly halfway between Safeway and Trader Joe’s:

So my grocery store vibe detection is unmatched and I win forever.