Walk into a conventional American supermarket and the layout is a solved problem.
Floral near the door. Produce along one wall. Center aisles of packaged goods arranged by a diagram that is nearly identical in every store in the chain.
Walk into a Tony’s Fresh Market in Chicago and it does not feel like that at all.
Produce is not a department. It is the event. Enormous quantities, stacked high, prices on hand-marked signs that change.
It looks like a market rather than a chain.
That is not charm or neglect. It is a completely different economic model, and in 2022 it got bought by one of the largest private equity firms in the world.