The Daily Rake has a great article series going after these Bugman faggots.
Hey, thanks for the shoutout.
The author didn’t mention this because he’s enamored with small grocery stores, but I find it funny that bugmen demand absolute space efficiency when it comes to transportation and housing but have zero problem having 20 identical grocery stores which carry fewer unique items and whose combined area is larger than the single large grocery store. Also, the large grocery store can be stocked directly from a semi, whereas the smaller stores need a fleet of vans/small trucks.
I actually used to drive a semi, although we called it a tractor-trailer for some reason, and I deleted the paragraphs talking about that, since both pieces are already well over 5k words. It's definitely true that Costco, Walmart, and most very large supermarkets have loading docks for Semis, but I'm not sure that's a mark in their favour.
The urbanist bugcreatures make sure that anything they're somewhat correct on gets immediately overhyped and soy'd up, but I can tell you from experience that driving a semi-truck in urban areas can be an extremely stressful and dangerous experience. Big trucks are also annoying to other drivers for similar reasons as buses, something they never mention, and they do require the road infrastructure to be designed for them.
A hub and spoke system, where semis are unloaded in warehouses outside of town, then shipped to smaller stores in 10 ton trucks, should theoretically be much less efficient than direct point to point loading and unloading, but that's a bit like the urbanists saying "a bus can hold 150 people therefore that's 150 fewer people on the roads every time." I've had shipments from the Vancouver area to the Interior (about 300-400 km) where I took the whole semi-truck out with just four pallets inside. In the trailer you'll see something called a pallet bar, and some trailers even have the side supports built in. Others just have a spring loaded bar. They need to have this because often times the trailer isn't close to full, but it's not-economical to just have trucks and drivers sitting by without making money. Often trucking companies lose money on one leg of a trip in the hopes of making it back on another.
EDIT: For truck spergs, it's also possible that the trailer is weight-full, but not volume-full, and you should probably use a pallet bar all the time anyway. Nevertheless, trailers are often not close to full. This is simply a fact.
So yes, the ultimate in efficiency is definitely large trucks with point to point access. Big stores that can build big loading docks do so for a reason. But the economics are complicated, and I think there is a legitimate non-soy argument for not wanting a bunch of semi-trucks in your downtown area clogging up the roads and being generally obnoxious. Although as a counterpoint to all of that, a lot of my deliveries were done around 3 AM, so as to cause as little disruption as possible. Traffic and urban planning are complicated issues, and require non-ideological approaches from people who have far more data at their fingertips than I.
The “big box” grocery store is more efficient and their economies of scale are not exaggerated. There are plenty of places where a small store could be set up, even in single-family zoned areas, but the economics is just way in favor of the big store. The only thing more efficient is online shopping which removes the store entirely.
It’s just funny that people who demand you use centralized transit and live in large shared buildings instead of small individual ones for efficiency reasons also want distributed stores instead of centralized ones despite their inherent inefficiencies.
I'm not so sure about that. Zoning is zoning. If you aren't allowed to build commercial buildings like grocery stores, then you aren't allowed to build them.
But yes, the traffic soyboys are intolerable little cunts who pick and choose when efficiency is good versus bad. They also claim that extra road lanes cause "induced demand," which is bad, but bike lanes cause people to ride bikes (induced demand), and that's good. If they really cared about efficiency they'd be demanding more semi-truck access everywhere, not less.
The price discount between something like a Walmart and even a Kroger in the current landscape is nuts, saying nothing of a Bodega. Part of that is due to logistics; Walmart has a shit ton of trucks and the weight to get deals. A Bodega has no such purchasing power.
2. Walmart draws people into the store than just food. You want a TV? Think about getting a oven roasted chicken for dinner on the way home while you're at it. That helps offset the cost, other shit in the store.
3. Big parking lots, in store pick up, and as such the incentive to load your car as high as possible. A Bodega, you'll be lucky to get parking a block down, meaning you'll be carrying shit, limiting your load. With a car right there in the parking lot, that workers can even have my shit ready when I get there, my limit is my trunk and passenger seats. As such Walmart makes more money, prices go down, and I want to shop there more.
Walmart may have been a poor comparison, due to them selling other products, but Canadian grocery stores tend to be unfamiliar to an American audience, so I focused on them. Again, there is no question that the bigger the store, the greater the economy of scale, the cheaper the product. As I said in my piece, if you are forced to drive to the grocery store there is little reason for it not to be enormous, so as to outcompete on price. But if the government stopped making it illegal to build things where people live, there would be relatively smaller supermarkets within walking distance. This is not to say that the price advantage of big box stores would be meaningless, and I imagine that we would see a lot of small-medium supermarkets with decent prices combined with being within walking distance, or at least very convenient driving distance, for a smaller area.
Look, ultimately the government has to make it illegal to build the essentials of life near where people live for a reason. That reason being, if they didn't, people would do that. So all the arguments about economies of scale are somewhat moot anyway. If local grocery stores - not always bodega sized of course - weren't what people wanted, it wouldn't need to be illegal to build them.
You don't need to be an urbanite bugcreature train autist to hate that. In fact, you could be someone who will only ever shop at InsertEnormousRetailStoreHere with your car to want this changed, because other people choosing to walk to a local store instead of drive to the designated commercial zone shits up the streets with needless congestion.
What a great series so far, glad to see someone else finally address and refute urbanists. I do agree that as time went on Jason Slaughter's videos have gotten more and more retarded. He's either running out of ideas or never had any good ones.
By the way, that crop at the end of Jason looks like the same one in my OP...
View attachment 4193095
Is it possible he read my thread?
Oh I think it's downright probable
I wrote the first piece before Christmas, then mostly took Christmas off to spend time with my family. In between piece 1 and piece 2 someone linked me to this thread. I was actually kind of miffed, since I had been planning this since before you started it, but had been overworked with other things and got beat to the punch. But it's a really high quality thread, and you focus on some different things than I do, since I'm less interested in their offputting and annoying personalities, and more interested in, say, totally destroying the annoying myth that high speed passenger rail belongs in Canada. But we'll get there later.
EDIT: If you're wondering about the pic, I made a Farms account a while back when writing about little Juan Fuentes.
As expected, the notes are full of anti car yelling, and at least one person who wants to murder Henry Ford.
