Food shopping made fun.(supermarkets)

Frozen Food Age, March, 2005 by Wellman, David

One of the things I think supermarket operators overlook is the extent to which they're in the entertainment industry. With a few high-profile exceptions--grocery stores among them--retailing is virtually a leisure industry now. Shopping is something people do as a recreational activity. It's something they do because it's fun.

Why else would we dedicate huge tracts of land to gigantic malls, which are then surrounded by restaurants, movie theatres, even sports arenas and stadiums? Here in my home state of New Jersey, they're wrangling out the final details on "Xanadu," an eye-popping $1.3 billion project that will transform 4.8 million square feet of the swampy New Jersey Meadowlands adjacent to Giants Stadium into a huge retail, entertainment, and office...