Convenience Stores: A Landscape Perspective

The convenient store may be the quintessential post-modern landscape artifact. This essay explores the evolution of our notion of convenience, design strategies, and business practices used by convenience store operators who have sought to capitalize on American’s evolving sensitivity to the passage of time. Also discussed is the mechanism by which effective delivery of time-savings through clever landscape design reinforces an ever-increasing sense of entitlement to time-efficient conveniences across a broad spectrum of daily practices.