Grocery Store

As a guy who's spent his entire working life running a beer distributorship, I often ask my customers, "What's good about selling beer in convenience stores?" The answer runs something like this: "It's convenient. You can stop for gas, and get beer and cigarettes at the same time. " Now, I can't be the only person who sees a problem with making it easy to buy beer and gasoline in one convenient location. And even though I live in Luzerne County, I know that people in Philadelphia's neighborhoods already are troubled by "convenience stores" that are more than a little careless about checking IDs for underage drinking and that all too often become nuisances in otherwise peaceful residential neighborhoods.

Millions of Harry Potter fans around the world are gearing up for the release of the seventh and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, tomorrow. For the last eight years, children and adults have been swept up in the craze that is Pottermania, and Chester County residents are no exception. West Chester, Downingtown and Kennett Square have all won a spot on Amazon.com's top-100 list of the Harry-est towns in America, based on daily tallies of preorder sales.

This was more - a great deal more - than another groundbreaking for a run-of-the-mill local construction project. Nearly 300 people from four West Philadelphia communities joined a major real estate developer, business leaders, Mayor Street, half a dozen other politicians, a Baptist church choir, and a throng of students from a charter school yesterday to launch what is likely to be the neighborhood's largest shopping center for years to come....

The new Fresh Grocer supermarket in Germantown offers freshly made hoagies every day, along with goat meat, Chinese rabbit, oxtails, chicken feet, and flanken in the meat case, and collards, cactus pears and rappini in the produce aisle. The ShopRite on Island Avenue in the city includes a large selection of Halal meats (hand-slaughtered by Islamic law) and even beauty products made without any alcohol for the Muslim customers who shop there. Little by little, as real supermarkets are slowly returning to the city's neighborhoods, and as the grocery wars heat up in the suburbs, successful owners are following the formula of the old-fashioned corner store: stocking products especially for the people who live nearby.

Back from Mexico and visiting family in Chester last year, Ernestine "Tina" Johnson said she was shocked to discover one advantage that part of the developing world held over the suffering U.S. city. "I asked my aunt if we could purchase some fresh fruit for breakfast," said Johnson, who taught in Mexico. "We got in the car, and she headed down the freeway to Delaware. " The last supermarket left Chester about 15 years ago, joining an exodus of jobs and residents from the once prosperous industrial city of 37,000.

The son of an employee of the Camden County Office of Hispanic Affairs was gunned down Friday night outside a corner grocery store in East Camden, authorities said yesterday. Andres Camacho 3d, 26, of East Camden, was slain about 9:50 p.m. Friday by a lone shooter who approached him on foot and shot him once in the head after Camacho left a Hispanic grocery store at Berwick Street and Marlton Pike, said Bill Shralow, Camden County Prosecutor's Office spokesman. He died at the scene shortly after.

The effort to reconstruct North Philadelphia's Progress Plaza, the nation's first shopping center owned and developed by African Americans, received a $500,000 boost from the state yesterday. The grant, part of a state initiative to bring grocery stores to depressed communities statewide, will be used to help pay to demolish the existing, vacant supermarket and several other stores in the plaza at Broad and Oxford Streets near Temple University. It also will be used to help renovate the plaza and build a Fresh Grocer supermarket.

A motorist was crushed and killed and three city firefighters were injured when a car and a ladder truck responding to an alarm crashed in West Philadelphia yesterday afternoon. The accident occurred about 1:30 p.m. at South 59th Street and Cedar Avenue in the Cobbs Creek section. The fire truck, racing to a call of a gas leak at 60th and Chancellor Streets, careered into the front of a grocery store after the crash, injuring three customers. The crushed car - a gray, late-model Ford Taurus - ended up partly underneath the fire truck, and hit and damaged the front of a rowhouse next to the grocery.

ABOUT 40 YEARS AGO, supermarket owners began to board up their inner-city neighborhood stores and high-tail it to the suburbs, where the vegetables seemed greener, the shoppers richer and the parking lots bigger. They followed the "white flight" vapor trails. With 1 percent profit margins the industry norm, owners thought they could improve their bottom line outside the urban areas. Low-income folks, the thinking went, couldn't sustain a profitable supermarket. That belief has been proven wrong.

Even before Mark Felt provoked a gale of accusation and retort by identifying himself as Watergate's secretive Deep Throat, the issue at the heart of his role had taken on a new and pressing prominence: Ethics. Today the question of ethics - who has them, who doesn't, and the ramifications for both - is generating news and disagreement from boardroom to bedroom to jury room. "It's become like a national pastime, commenting on it, and talking about it," says Buie Seawell, former Senate chief of staff to Gary Hart, a man who knows something about ethical puzzles.