In my opinion, corner stores are best test of whether you live in a “real city.” Knowing that at any reasonable hour of the day or night you can walk around the corner into a brightly lit store full of sandwiches, shaving cream, milk, pet food, toilet paper, cough syrup, and a hundred things people need in their everyday lives is a freedom that defines urban life.
That’s why great cities are measured by the quality and ubiquity of corner stores. I’ll never forget the feeling of walking into a Manhattan corner deli (or “bodega,” as Andrew Yang would say). They are case studies in efficiency, using space in ways known only to submarines or airplane cabins. By the same token, 7-11s in Japan are everywhere and chock full of anything people need. This is especially true for their convenience food, arrays of pre-packaged and fresh sandwiches and bento boxes that blow away most American groceries in terms of health, price, and quality. In general, the corner stores of Minneapolis and St. Paul have a long way to go to match the convenience of the world’s great cities.
Yet there are always exceptions. Hands down, St. Paul’s best corner store is Tim and Tom’s Speedy Market in St. Anthony Park, the only Twin Cities corner shop that competes with a great New York deli. Walking into the mundane building off Como Avenue, you’re immediately greeted with a message board covered in business cards and hand-written notes about odd jobs or rooms for rent. Just ahead of you lies a basket of fresh cookies, and a cooler full of unique sandwiches and salads, constantly produced by back-room workers.
The rest of the market is full of narrowly spaced shelves stacked to the ceiling with dry goods, produce, and basic supplies that rival any big box grocery. Measured in terms of products-per-square-foot, I’ve not seen its match in Minnesota.
As owner Tom Spreigl describes it, the market evolved over the years from a local grocery named Blomberg’s back in the 1920s into part of the Speedy Market convenience chain, run by local dairy enterprise Schroeder (now Agropur).
“Tim, my business partner, started his career with Speedy back in ’81 working in the meat department,” said Spreigl. “I started working for Speedy in 1978 in high school and never left. I worked with them in various forms, up through managers, and did some deli supervising. In about 1995, they decided to sell off the stores, and we came back here to run it. [We] asked them to buy it from them, and they said OK.”
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke[/image_credit][image_caption]One key to the market’s success is listening to customer feedback; for example, Speedy Market now has a whole case full of hummus varieties, something they didn’t have years ago.[/image_caption]
“It’s harder than people realize,” said Spreigl. “It’s tough on the body. When you’re an owner-operator, you’re a little bit of everything: in charge of personnel, doing most of the ordering, a lot of the stock work. It’s constant, everyday, coming in and going out, small fires and big fires to put out.”
Across town at Kamp’s
The Twin Cities’ best corner stores don’t have to be fancy, but they do tend to have meat counters. For years I lived in St. Paul’s North End, a few doors down the street from a 130-year-old family grocery store named Kamp’s Food Market. I can’t count the number of times that Kamp’s saved my butt by remaining open until 9 p.m., the only place in the neighborhood that carried basic household goods and a wide array of food.
Like most of the remnant independent grocers, the heart of Kamp’s place was always the meat counter. The array of fresh and frozen cuts of meat at Kamp’s is unparalleled, everything from pig’s feet to short ribs, alongside the homemade brats and other fare.
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke[/image_credit][image_caption]As at most of the remnant independent grocers, the heart of Kamp’s Food Market was always the meat counter.[/image_caption]
“Kamp’s has been in business for 134 years. Lisa [Kamp] and I have been running it for almost the last 40. Running a small business is all-consuming. We’ve given it our all for a looong [sic] time. Everybody retires. It’s our turn. Nobody loves the North End more than I do. I work here, I live here and almost 100% of my donations of time & money go here. We’ve never had more than seven-day vacation and very few of those. I’m certainly not complaining. I’ve made thousands of friends and millions of memories here, but, for the lack of a better word, I’m old & tired.”
Much like Tom Spreigl five miles to the west, Paul and his wife, Lisa, have been putting in long hours, keeping the store open for more than 13,000 straight days. The hard work has caught up to him. As Kamp described: “I want to jump into a car and have zero plans. I have family and friends all around the country I’ve never visited. It’s time to bother them a bit!”
There’s a big economic gap between the Rice Street neighborhood and St. Anthony Park, where Kamp’s and Tim and Tom’s markets are respectively located. The former is a working-class area that’s been struggling with disinvestment for a generation, seeing businesses close up shop and struggling to deal with some of St. Paul’s worst poverty. Meanwhile, St. Anthony Park has been St. Paul’s preeminent bourgeois enclave since the 19th century, and while it’s diverse in many ways, residents there have an average income that’s 50% higher than in the North End. That gap helps to explain the differing fortunes of the two markets.
Another key variable is easy bike and transit access. Corner markets rely on a steady stream of customers coming by on foot, drawing from the immediate neighborhood or by an easy bus ride. It helps a ton that Speedy Market sits directly on the busy No. 3 bus line, and next to convenient bike lane. Unlike people driving cars, who tend to fill their trunks at the largest big-box groceries they can find, transit customers are more likely to shop local.
The ’15-minute neighborhood’
The latest hot trend in urban planning is the idea of the so-called “15-minute neighborhood,” a concept that you can find in plans all across the country. Like many planning concepts, the notion that you should be able to walk to buy a bottle of milk or a light bulb is not rocket science. Making those neighborhoods into a reality remains a challenge that might be a key to fighting climate change.
[image_credit]City of St. Paul[/image_credit]
If that’s the goal, there’s a long way to go. Most corner stores in St. Paul offer little more than Frito-Lays and cigarettes, places where you’re hard pressed to find an onion. Stores like Kamp’s and Speedy Market remain a rarity across town.
Kamp’s remains for sale on Western Avenue, and Paul and Lisa aren’t closing up shop yet.
Meanwhile, Tom Spreigl is not ready to retire. Instead, he’s buoyed by the interest his sons have in the family business, promising to keep the city’s best corner store thriving into the future.
“I’m lucky because my business partner decided to retire three years ago, but both of my sons are interested in continuing on with the legacy,” Spreigl said. “Gosh, yeah, I’m excited about that. They’ve been working here with me since they were little. It seems a natural fit for us.”
“…the notion that you should be able to walk to buy a bottle of milk or a light bulb is not rocket science…”
For decades, the tradeoff I anticipated if/when I moved to an actual city, rather than a suburb, was that I’d be giving up a degree of quiet and space, and, for lack of a better term, “newness,” and in return I’d be getting more and more convenient parks, and more importantly, convenient access to goods and services as Bill has stated above.
Alas, that has not been my experience in Minneapolis. My neighborhood in the far northwest corner of the city has roughly 1,500 lots – the vast majority of them at about 5,000 square feet – and exactly one (1) lot that’s zoned “commercial.” It used to be occupied by a print shop, but is currently the most dreary daycare center in the county, featuring an outdoor play area paved entirely in asphalt (it’s the former parking lot of the print shop), surrounded by chain link fence (it sits on a fairly busy corner intersection with a major arterial street). It’s the only retail space in the entire neighborhood, and for me or my neighbors to acquire literally anything in the way of goods and/or services beyond day care, a car is required. I once took a bus – after a half-mile walk to the nearest applicable stop – from that bus stop to the nearest restaurant, a mile-and-a-half to the south. The bus ride to get to the restaurant took longer than the time it took me to walk home after the meal. The nearest grocery – a Cub store in Brooklyn Center – is more than a mile to the north. It’s an hour-plus to “pick up something at the store.”
My neighborhood is a case study in the opposite of what Bill’s column is celebrating. Instead, it’s a demonstration of single-use planning and zoning from the 1950s, when the area was built out. Many in the neighborhood like it just like that, but it feels to me like an odd historical exhibit, encased in amber and preserved for future generations to puzzle over. Except for having sidewalks, most of the planning “evils” of suburban development are right here on display. Shingle Creek and its associated greenway, coupled with the open space of a former public elementary school and a still-extant middle school, provide a surprising amount of linear park space from northwest to southeast, virtually all of it within that 15-minute urban time window, but aside from the irony of the open space, this is easily the most stereotypically “suburban” place I’ve ever lived.
I have attempted to use the term “bodega” for places like this outside NYC with zero success.
Great piece, Bill.
Nice article, Bill! Do you know Widmer’s Supermarket in Mac-Groveland? Has a lot of what you’re talking about, but not open at night.
There’s a store in Coon Rapids called Jensen’s that is a lot like Kamp’s (where I have also shopped). Exceptional bakery and meat departments, some local produce when it is in season, a single, convenience store style checkout area.
Speedy Market really does respond to customer requests, and it’s obvious in the store. It is probably the major hub in the neighborhood, in addition to the library. The way they adapted to COVID has been wonderful, and the community supported them further.
Grocery chains (Cub, Lunds/Byerlys) are building smaller stores in city neighborhoods. They don’t offer the vibe or the charm of the corner store, but they are convenient.
The mini-Target in Highland is my go-to.
Not a fan. That Target forced my local Barnes & Noble out. The B&N was profitable, but Target was willing to offer the property owner a lot more money, probably so it could test its mini-Target concept.
We used to have to correct that false claim a lot here in Highland.
Barnes and Noble operates on a dying business model and has been circling the drain for years. That was the case when the Highland store closed, and it has only gotten worse, with dozens of stores closing every year since.
I’d be more sympathetic if Target had replaced a locally-owned independent store, instead of a chain location. Ironically, it seems the independents are the only brick-and-mortar stores that are going to survive. But if you really want that Barnes and Noble experience, I think there still are a couple locations around still. At least for the time being.
It’s a good trend. I give Trader Joe’s and Aldi some credit for pushing in this direction.
I recognize the Japan comment re 7/11 stores there. This is also seen in Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong, and parts of China. Also in the EU. The thing missing in the Twin Cities and most USA cities except for NYC and to some extent Chicago, is that the Asian cities and big EU cities are dependent and revolve around mass transit, which means people are walking to/from home and station, or during the day to appointments, work, etc. and not using cars. This generates the need for such markets….(and in alot of Asia the street food phenomenon). In Japan people expect convenience food to be of decent quality, made from wholesome , safe ingredients as well. I know in Taiwan and Korea this is the same… Maybe the post pandemic work environment might change things in the USA?
Yeah, transit and being on foot are key to the whole idea.
My corner of the city, Nokomis, doesn’t have a corner store, but we do have an honest-to-goodness independent grocery store, a hardware store, library, post office, liquor store & a couple restaurants. A person could easily live here car free. But overall, Bill’s right. The bodega type corner store just isn’t in our culture.
Wonderful piece, Bill, an almost elegiac celebration of bodegas which, sadly, seem to be disappearing from the streets of NY. Meanwhile, in St Paul, although we have lots of examples of transit-based, higher density neighborhoods (e.g. along Green Line) which should be ideal sites for ‘corner stores,’ they all seem to have lots of empty commercial space. Is there something developers and planners overlooked in this setting? Is there a chance that this same empty-floor syndrome could appear at Highland Bridge as well and all the other nodal developments?
My neighborhood store in Brooklyn was certainly a bodega. It was the only place open in the area at the time, and only carried six-packs of Budweiser and Schlitz.
Here I was thinking I’d read a nifty story about city amenities and walkability… only to find a prolonged adverts for Tim and Tom’s and Kamp’s.