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The profitability of the supermarket over the last twenty years has been won largely at the expense of the small local shop. Will this trend continue? Maurice Zinkin suggests that it will not. Analysing the factors which brought about the decline of the small shop and the growth of the supermarket, he concludes that we have reached a watershed in food retailing. Changes in the social and the economic environment may mean that the supermarket's halcyon days are over, and that we are going to see a resurgence of the small shop, possibly of a specialised nature, which will, in turn, provoke even more savage price competition between the big retailers. What follows is a slightly shortened version of a paper delivered to the Hedderwick Stirling Grumbar ‘Food for Thought’ symposium in May.