Here are two things I do a fair amount (other than working and parenting): I think about how cities work, and I walk around my neighborhood in Oakland. Lately, I’ve been noticing how much of the retail space in my neighborhood is either empty or clearly doomed. Ford’s Fine Furniture on Grand Avenue is the latest to surprise no one by putting up CLOSING SALE signs in their window, but how much further behind can Silver Screen Video be? How long will a video rental with lots of square footage of retail space last in the face of Netflix and Amazon? What about that wedding dress store? And there are so many storefronts already empty.

I won’t miss Ford’s or either of the other stores (I would miss Walden Pond Books, and so we try to shop there a lot), but the thing I’ve been asking myself is this: If there are so many whole categories of stores that really just don’t make sense in an Internet economy, what does? What SHOULD move in when Silver Screen Video moves out?

In answering that question, my first thought was, okay, what seems to be doing well in my neighborhood these day? Well, nail salons and dry cleaners are clearly holding their own, and I see a lot of martial arts studios and places like Gymboree, where you take your toddler for an hour of inside play with other kids. The former are services and the latter are where you buy activities, not goods, and that makes a lot of sense. But the biggest category that’s thriving in the Grand Lake neighborhood is restaurants. Half a dozen appear to be thriving on Grand Avenue, several of them relatively new, and another half dozen just few blocks away on Lakeshore. They are taking over spaces that formerly held furniture stores (Camino) and shoe repair places (Boot and Shoe Service), but mostly they’re replacing really bad restaurants or fast food places with healthier, tastier options (Flipside, Chipotle, Kwik Way.)

So I’ll draw the unscientific conclusion that people seem to like the experience of good food near their homes. You can’t order a night out at Boot and Shoe Service from Amazon, and you’ll never be able to. But we can’t eat out all the time, and the options for good groceries in my neighborhood, and in most neighborhoods, fall pretty far behind the options for dining.

This has gotten me thinking about a business someone should start, or at least explore. I grew up in car-unfriendly New York City and back then you bought your groceries on the way home from the subway to the house. Sometimes that meant going to the A&P on Broadway for bigger items, sometimes you just stopped at the bodega on the corner if all you needed was milk and eggs. The bodega visit took about 60 seconds, so it was preferable. Now the closest store to our house is a Safeway, and while I suppose we’re lucky to have it there, overall it’s not what I want. The quality of the food is pretty low, it takes a long time to get in and out, and the experience does little to strengthen the feeling of being part of the neighborhood. We can walk to Safeway (with a large parking lot, it’s a driving destination for most people), but we tend to drive instead to get better quality food at Piedmont Grocery, Berkeley Bowl, or even Whole Paycheck -- I mean Whole Foods. What we really need, though, are good bodegas, built in areas where people walk or would walk, but bodegas that carry more than milk and eggs, that devote more of their space to broccoli and less to beer.

I’m not exactly the first person to observe this, and I’m sure many people have much more insight into why our local corner stores tend to be so pathetic as purveyors of food items other than chips and wine coolers. But I did start thinking about some ideas of how to approach this problem from an entrepreneurial perspective, and I keep thinking I wish I had more time to explore this idea. So here, for what it’s worth, is my someone-else-should-try-this plan:

Reinvent the local corner store. Bi-Rite has done this. My very first apartment in San Francisco was steps from a traditional corner store (not on the corner in this case, but whatever) that sold liquor, chips, and a scattering of actual food items. Thatf place has since become famous by reinventing itself as a source for local, organic, healthy prepared food and groceries (and making some of the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted). Sure, it’s in an area where people have money, and where most people really value these options and are willing to pay for them. But more and more people do, and are.

Learn a bunch, then scale. Build a franchise. What if some fantastic, committed entrepreneurs, who cared about building a sustainable business AND about making neighborhoods healthier and stronger, set about to learn what works in small grocery stores, and then packaged that? What if they made it easier for someone who wanted to run a store like this to have most of the benefits of the larger stores with whom they’d compete, but still a lot of autonomy and connection to the local community? I could see someone offering a package that included guidelines for choosing a space, inventory lists, great simple, beautiful, easy-to-use IT systems (including point of sale, using Square, etc) and graphics and branding.

Leverage data. The branding/IT/how-to package could be useful, but the big advantage would be access to data and analysis that few corner stores have today. It would start with data analysis to help choose the right locations: demographics, traffic patterns, tax bases, whatever’s relevant. It would continue as stores opened to include analysis of what’s selling, what’s profitable, the impact of location of items in each store, and each of the franchisees gets access to the data and analysis of all the other stores. You could run tests to continually optimize the inventory and layout, and make recommendations broadly. Franchisees could interpret those tests as they like, continuing to make slightly different decisions, giving more and more fodder for analysis and new tests. If the enterprise was born with a strong set of values and a commitment to a double-bottom line, the framework for decisions could continue to be informed not just by what sells best, but also by what’s best for the community. What items should be easiest to find? Can you make money putting something other than candy and chips by the register?

I don’t know enough about the supply chain of grocery stores, but I suspect that a franchise structure could help immensely not only in advantageous buying, but in informed, deep relationships with suppliers that optimize for both profits and health. Imagine 30 Bay Area corner stores who collectively bought from CSAs and local ranches, and shared what was going on at their produce and meat partners with their customers? What better way to sell what’s in season or what’s available? I can imagine a table up front with three recipes and the ingredients for each all laid out there in one spot. Don’t know what to make for dinner? Choose a dish off today’s “menu” and grab whatever’s not already in your cupboard without even wandering around the store. Maybe there are ways to make kale more convenient than fries. These stores could be laboratories to find out.

Technology. I’ve talked about the use of data to let these small stores compete with the Safeways of the world (who already use data extensively, of course). But a new line of franchised corner stores with the right tech team would also have the opportunity to experiment with different kinds of customer-facing technology that I don’t see Safeway doing. I’m sure there are a lot of ideas we could come up with – like smartphone apps that let you place your order on the bus on the way home from work and swing by and pick up your already bagged, already paid-for groceries on the walk from the bus stop -- and many of them may not work, but at least you’d have the benefit of the aforementioned network of laboratories to figure out what consumers will use at a lower cost to each store. I think about what Uber has done for the experience of taking cabs, and I think it just HAS to be possible to create those experiences in areas that really matter, like how we find and choose the food we eat.

Urban gardening. This may be too far afield, but in my wildest dreams these corner stores also become distribution hubs for a hyper-local farming. Right now, in the winter, our eight chickens produce just a few more eggs than we can reasonably consume, so we just give away a half-dozen every so often. This summer, when we’re getting 6-7 eggs a day (I hope), I’ll be actively giving them away, which is totally fine. If I go nuts (as I am prone to do), and enlarge the coop so we can fit in a few more Easter Eggers (I miss my green and blue eggs since those chickens died), we’ll have more than we can even give away, but there’s no way I’m setting up a stand at the farmer’s market. If there’s ever a hot summer in Oakland again, we’d have a bumper crop of tomatoes, and while canning them is fun, it could be fun to get them in the hands of neighbors too. Regulations regarding food production (of which I’m a fan, for the record) don’t currently allow you to sell what comes out of your garden commercially, but I’d love to see these regulations evolve in some way that’s both safe and supportive of a more peer-to-peer economy. On the other hand, its fun to give this stuff away.

Small is beautiful. How big does a grocery store need to be? There’s a little “bodega” off of Precita Park in San Francisco that can’t be more than 400 square feet, and yet it carries organic milk, eggs, meat, produce, grains and other staples, and a terrific selection of excellent wines and beers. You can get what you need to make a simple, healthy dinner here. And the time you’ll spend in the store is a tiny fraction of what you’d spend driving to a Safeway. (Sorry, Safeway, I keep picking on you). I wonder what the rent is on a space that small. I wonder how profitable that store is. I wonder how we could have those on every corner.

Meaningful work for people who care about their communities. Tim O’Reilly’s original business plan for O’Reilly Media was “interesting work for interesting people.” I think about these stores in relation to the people they’d provide business opportunities and jobs for too. At Code for America, I see 20- and 30-somethings who care deeply about communities, and among my friends, as we’ve had kids and settled down, I’ve seen the focus shift to the neighborhoods we’re increasingly invested in, and the larger communities around us, with all their diversity. In particular, I see a lot of women with great business skills and significant tech savvy increasingly looking for flexible jobs close to home, but also jobs that will contribute to creating the world they want their kids to grow up in. There’s an adorable resale/art/creative goods store on Grand Ave near me called Rebooty, run by a couple with a toddler and an infant, and the kids are just there with the mom, and sometimes the dad. A small grocery store would likely (hopefully!) have a faster pace and require a dedicated clerk, but you could see a mom or dad or both doing inventory, accounting and other work while raising kids, especially when they’re in school or even preschool. To the extent that running a local store may also have some significant drawbacks as a career, is it made more attractive by the support of the larger community of store owners, and by the sense that you’d be part of a movement to change how we eat and live in cities?

I guess in a way this is just another idea along the lines of the Disrupt All the Things meme, which Halle Tecco at Rock Health has adopted to great effect for her healthcare accelerator. We (often privileged) fans of the Internet tend to display technology optimism, and it’s not always adequately informed by the reality of the status quo, so it can come off as dreamy at best and elitist at worst. More than that, though, this isn’t an idea I’m leaving Code for America to pursue, and ideas are a dime a dozen; if this would even work, it would be all in the execution. But I’m sharing these thoughts because I like walking around my neighborhood, and I’d like some good small grocery stores. I think they’re good for me and my family and good for my community. And I’d like other communities to have them too. So I’m hoping someone else will do it.