Pardon me, but, what is it with North America and gargantuan grocery stores? Go to most major cities in Europe or South America, for example, and a 35000sqft store is humungous! They might have a couple that are about this big, or a bit bigger, but most will be about half of that.
lol. the Brewery District store is my local one, been shopping there since it opened. In this particular case, a fair amount of the floorspace is taken up by 'extras' like a cupcake counter, cafe, a proliferation of deli counters, and a lot of open space for cafe tables and displays. in the case of the Brewery District Loblaws, the actual 'Grocery-Store' bit is a fair bit smaller than the total square footage. the rest being features, helping to fill out the food offerings in the otherwise slightly spotty Brewery District as a whole.
That being said, the grocery area, while definitely sufficient to sustain an apartment, does lack in some areas. it doesn't have a consistent selection of frozen food, and the size of stuff they carry is small. (ie only small bags of french fries, fewer family-size items like cereal, etc) As someone living in an actual house right now, The selection is at times insufficient, and I still have to make the longer trek to the Westmount Safeway (idk how big, but that's full-size, whatever that equates to) to get things like cleaning supplies in bigger bottles, soap refills, and supplies for big dinners. The store just isn't stocked as a one-stop shop for a household, and given the retail mix of the Brewery District right now, the complex as a whole doesn't fill in the gaps (yet, hopefully this will improve)
IDK enough about how stores are stocked, how those decisions are made, whether the stock choices at the Brewery District are driven by marketing or by the size of the store. Maybe they could be a fully useable copy of a full-size safeway if they dropped the (really fun but kinda superfluous) cupcake counter etc. But i do think the smaller stores drive a lot of decisions and cutbacks that are difficult for retailers to navigate. They aren't sure what to carry and what to cut, and our retail landscape of essential stores (Loblaws, Safeway, Shoppers, Rexall, Superstore, etc) isn't diverse enough to fill those gaps, leaving market share out in the open. The Answer: sell everything, one-stop shop, and build the store assize enough to fill it! This isn't an ideal way of handling the situation, especially in an urban environment. But unless we have a whole bunch of small, convenient shops/chains that fill the household consumer niches of 'cleaning supplies' and 'bulk groceries' and 'delis that aren't subway but still sell food that you an microwave and eat' (like the deli counters at loblaws sell) our major Grocery Chains are going to expand to serve those markets, and build large stores that allow them to provide these services as well as the basic 'sell food.'
IDK about all this, but i think Loblaws is trying to fill a whole bunch of niches at once, they way it tries to in the Brewery District. Given the lack of serious corporate competition, it makes business sense to do so, to the consumer's benefit. In the end, selling a full spectrum of groceries, as well as providing all the extra services we as consumers expect our grocers to have, takes a lot of space.
