that is why there definitely should be way to tag this as more detailed tag (
food=?specific_food=?shop:food=?)
and to distinguish a shop that has only a specific product (say olive oil) from one that has also other things (but still isn’t considered a grocery or convenience store because the assortment of goods lacks significant segments which you would expect in such a shop, what is also quite depending on the region).
Agreed, I was careful not to be too prescriptive when describing the grocery categories earlier. Even within a region, different demographics may expect different offerings within a grocery store.
On the one hand, someone may be looking for a specific product. OSM could help find an appropriate store to some extent, but we probably won’t ever be very reliable for this use case, since there exists no universal ontology of products (other than an ASIN perhaps).
On the other hand, there’s value in categorizing shops even if the user isn’t looking for a specific product. If I want to do my week’s grocery shopping, I don’t need to know that the shop carries breakfast cereal; I just need to know that it’s a supermarket, which implies a large, well-rounded selection, whatever specific products that entails in the local context. With the wiki’s binary choice between convenience and supermarket, I don’t know for sure whether the supermarket is really a full-service supermarket (where I assume I can also get a fresh fish, design a birthday cake, and stock up on toilet paper), or whether it’s just a grocery store (where I might only be able to buy half the items, depending on the grocer).
Dry goods store could also be useful in the same vein. If I’m looking for golden raisins or chocolate-covered Swedish fish by the pound, I can’t count on OSM to have a tag for that, but if there’s a dry goods store nearby, it’s the best bet for something like that.
Useless for that use case, yes. But there are many different types of data consumers with different needs.
agreed, there are usecases for every way of tagging.