One after another, grocery stores are shutting down in rural Sweden, leaving villagers to travel kilometers to buy food.
However, a new type of shop has sprung up in their wake: unstaffed supermarkets in mobile containers.
In Veckholm, a village of a few hundred people 80km from Stockholm, the last grocery store closed more than a decade ago. Then, a year-and-a-half ago, even the little convenience store at the only gas station locked its doors.
Photo: AFP
Villagers were left with no choice but to travel a half-hour by car to the closest supermarket.
However, in July last year, an automated, unstaffed grocery store came to town.
In a container dropped in the middle of a field, open 24 hours a day, the 20m2 supermarket sells hundreds of items — and there is no cashier in sight.
“Since a while back, there has been nothing in this area and I think most of us living here have really missed that,” said Giulia Ray, a beekeeper in Veckholm.
“It’s so convenient to have this in the area,” she told reporters, doing her own shopping and restocking the shop’s shelves with her honey at the same time.
Shoppers unlock the supermarket’s door with an app on their smartphone.
“We come here three times a week and buy stuff we need,” Lucas Edman, a technician working in the region for a few weeks, told reporters. “It’s a little bit more expensive, but it’s fine. It’s a price I can pay to not go to another store.”
In Sweden, the number of grocery stores — everything from superstores to small convenience stores — has dropped from 7,169 in 1996 to 5,180 last year, according to official statistics.
While the number of superstores has almost tripled in 24 years, many rural shops have closed down, often due, like elsewhere in Europe, to a lack of profitability.
Daniel Lundh, who cofounded the Lifvs, has opened almost 30 unstaffed stores in rural Sweden and in urban areas with no shops in the past two years.
“To be able to keep low prices for the customer, we have to be able to control our operation costs. So that means controlling the rent — that’s why the stores are quite small — but also controlling the staffing cost,” Lundh said.
He plans to open his first unstaffed supermarkets outside Sweden early next year.
Domenica Gerlach, who manages the Veckholm store, only comes by once a week to receive deliveries. She also manages three other shops, all of them mobile containers.
Peter Book, the mayor of Enkoping, the municipality to which Veckholm belongs, has only good things to say about the three container stores that have opened in his patch — and he would like to see more.
“It makes it easier to take a step to move there if you know you have this facility,” he said.
In Sweden, one of the most digitalized countries in the world, Lifvs, like its Swedish rivals AutoMat and 24Food, which have also popped up in rural areas, benefits from a wired population.
In 2019, 92 percent of Swedes had a smartphone.
Ironically, the unstaffed shops — plopped down in the middle of nowhere — also play a role as a “meeting place” for locals.
“You come here, you get some gas and you go inside and get something, and maybe someone else is here and you can have a chat,” Ray said.
Book echoed the notion, saying the stores make it possible to “connect society.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia