Grocery Stores
A mid-size Asian supermarket on Odlin Road in West Cambie, quieter than the No. 3 Road giants. Rice in every format, sauces, frozen dim sum, and a produce section priced for people cooking Chinese food at home most nights of the week.
Rice comes in every format anyone could reasonably want, which is the point of a store named this way. Rice World is a mid-size Asian supermarket on Odlin Road carrying sauces, frozen dim sum and a produce section priced for households cooking Chinese food most nights of the week rather than as an occasional project. It runs calmer than the No. 3 Road giants and it is meant to.
Odlin Road crosses West Cambie east to west, through an area that has filled in with housing over the last decade. A store this size serves the blocks around it. It does not pull shoppers from across the city, which is precisely why it stays manageable on a Saturday afternoon, when the flagship supermarkets have a queue at every till and nowhere left to put a cart.
Size is the trade-off worth understanding. The big stores carry more of everything and cost you twenty minutes in the car park. A store this size gets you in and out with dinner. Neither is better in the abstract, and plenty of households in this part of Richmond end up using both for different jobs.
The interesting question at any grocer is never how large the store is. It is how fast the vegetables move, and you can read that off how full the bins are and how carefully somebody has stacked them.
In the West Cambie neighbourhood of Richmond.
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