I would think most places would have more bars than grocery stores. Even a pretty big town usually only needs what, 5 or 6 grocery stores for a population of under 100,000? And they can be more distant. People like bars to be near them and they generally don't have the capacity of a grocery store, so you need more of them. Overhead is much lower too, obviously.
in my experience, the grocery stores in sweden tend to be considerably smaller than the grocery stores in the united states. pretty much every grocery store in the US is larger than an ica maxi. there needs to be room for all 20 flavors of toothpaste and all 40 flavors of oreos.
That person is probably thinking of European size stores. I think grocery stores in the US might just be bigger on average than they are in Sweden? We have some big mega stores here compared to Europe.
yeah ours are oftentime closer to convenience stores, and distributed fairly evenly so people largely just go to the closest one. Stuff like walmart is terrifyingly big, that's what i'd consider an entire mall.