Eli5 How do grocery stores around the world afford to be fully/half stocked in a product 24/7 simultaneously even in small towns where not everything’s bought?

Question

Eli5 How do grocery stores around the world afford to be fully/half stocked in a product 24/7 simultaneously even in small towns where not everything’s bought?

In: 47

Answer 1

>simultaneously even in small towns where not everything’s bought?

In reality, they don’t.

There’s a reason most small grocers have gone out of business to regional Walmarts. In more urban areas it’s easy, but most of rural America is a [food desert](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert). In fact,. [13.5 million Americans](https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2011/05/03/interactive-web-tool-maps-food-deserts-provides-key-data#:~:text=The%20Locator%20identifies%20about%2010,to%20sources%20of%20healthful%20food.) live in food deserts. And even for areas that don’t meet the qualifications for food desert, it’s not uncommon in rural America for the only grocery store option in town to be a Dollar General and the nearest fresh foods to be the Walmart 30+ minutes away. And Walmart only survives in those locations by surviving multiple towns over a huge geographic area.

Small towns don’t have grocery stores any more because it isn’t affordable.