I want to live on top of a grocery store.

The other night there was a dish I wanted to make, but I was missing one ingredient. I didn’t want to drive all the way over to the store just to buy the one missing ingredient–I wanted to eat dinner. “If I lived in one of those apartment complexes right over a grocery store,” I thought, “I could just run downstairs and get just what I need.”

There is nothing that we buy more often than food, so of all possible stores a grocery store is th e one you want to have closest.

I know of two apartment complexes built over grocery stores, Uwajimaya Village Apartments over Uwajimaya downtown, and another set built on top of PCC in Fremont. (Update: a new building has opened up above a QFC next to the Seattle Center, and then I found out there are condos above a Whole Foods on Westlake by Denny.)

If you lived over a grocery store you could always have the freshest fruits and vegetables.

Your perishables will never spoil, because you’re constantly rotating your supply.

You never have to worry about when you’re going to run out of milk or bread, because there’s always more downstairs.

Instead of looking though your cupboards trying to decide what to have for dinner, you have an entire grocery store at you immediate disposal, where you can pick the items required for just the dinner you want.

It would be an entirely different shopping paradigm. In the old style you compile a list of things you’ve run out of until it’s long enough to warrant a trip to the grocery store, where you stock up on everything you think you might need over the coming weeks. With the new style you could make much more frequent trips just for the tings you need, when you need them.

The next time I look for an apartment, I’ll check out the ones close to the grocery stores first.

After writing this I found an article from the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce called “Living over the store in funky Fremont”, which discusses some of the benefits and challenges of building an apartment complex on top of a supermarket.