This spring, the grocery store of my childhood and yours, the D’Agostino in Brooklyn Heights, cleared out, to be replaced by a CVS drug store.

The D’Agostino company said the reason for closing had to do with occupying a landmark-designated building, which prohibited the chain from putting up flashy signs or, say, painting the doors hot pink. The people at D’Agostino suggested the problem was that passers-by did not realize what they were passing by.

Last time I looked, visibility hardly seemed the problem. Delivery boys were lingering outside, leaning sulkily but not subtly on “D’Ag” carts. Customers exited clutching their conspicuously marked “D’Ag Bags” with loaves of French bread and pineapple tops sticking out. Nobody would walk by and think it was the Gap.

Obviously, the fundamental reason the store had to close is that people in the neighborhood were deciding to buy their food elsewhere. As it happens, Garden of Eden opened on Montague Street a few years ago. D’Agostino had its low-frills appeal, with a serious supply of junk food and benevolent deli men who were always willing to slip kids fatty slices of salami when their moms weren’t looking – as a child, how I loved grocery shopping! – but there’s no beating a gourmet goliath.

They didn’t have imported Italian sodas. They didn’t have an olive bar the size of an Olympic swimming pool. They were doomed the second the new Garden of Eden rang up its first sale.

As online grocery services continue to add neighborhoods to their routes and fancy food stores such as Garden of Eden and Whole Foods proliferate, the city’s old-fashioned supermarkets have nowhere to go but off the map.

In the past four years, three Whole Foods have come to the city. Two more are in the works, including one for Park Slope. The Gourmet Garage chain says its sales are up 8% over last year, higher than ever in its 12-year history. And for the first time ever, gourmet food shops now account for the majority of our food spending.

Key Food used to have 25 stores in the city. Only 14 remain according to an official, Patrick Purcell, of the local supermarket workers union, UCFW 1500. The president of Gristede’s, John Catsimatidis, predicted his chain’s total of traditional supermarkets will drop by half in the next 10 years. “The closings are outnumbering the openings,” Mr. Catsimatidis said in a telephone interview.

Leaders of the old-fashioned supermarkets are scrambling to win back their customers. Some are putting in sushi bars and expanding their prepared-food sections. D’Agostino has gone retro and started up a D’Ag Reward program, a revamping of the green-stamp program popular in the 1970s. Customers receive electronic points for every dollar spent and can use them toward future purchases of items ranging from Tupperware containers to golf clubs.

Meanwhile, customers have reason to be worried as a staple of New York life is fast disappearing. Our mom-and-pop supermarkets might be a little dingy at times, but they aren’t without their virtues. Like seedy diners or dive bars, old-fashioned supermarkets are an indispensable piece of the fabric of our city. They offer us sustenance – and not just of the nutritional variety. We go there to clear our minds, to pick up Cool Whip, Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, and other unfashionable items. We go there to push our carts mindlessly down the aisles and let the Muzak lap over our stress. The lighting may be terrible, the plastic-wrapped carnations may look as though they’ve seen better days, but the aisles are without pretension. It’s as if people are wandering around in slow motion.

Real-deal supermarkets – not the kind that carries fresh sashimi – attract people from all walks of life: single moms, harried businesspeople, Pilates princesses, men in Mylar tank tops, pajama-clad college students. As the Clash’s song “Lost in the Supermarket” puts it: “I came in here for that special offer/A guaranteed personality.”

At the fancy stores – you know the ones – the food is beautiful, but it’s photogenic overkill. Everyone looks lithe, and the baskets all get filled with the same stuff: orchids and baby mangos and cheeses made from yak milk. What’s more, there’s no way you can strike up a bond with an employee: The store is always too crowded and efficient to allow for small talk.

The other day I went to the Food Emporium on Union Square to get out of the heat and wander around some. It was everything I wanted in a supermarket: acres of sliced white bread, tins of cat food with fading labels, Barbie-themed cakes at the bakery. There weren’t a lot of shoppers, but I managed to see fraternity brothers loading up on barrels of pretzels, old ladies shuffling around the cranberry-juice section in their housecoats, and a man with waist-length hair listening to sports radio on his very loud headset and annihilating a tray of raw vegetables and blue cheese dip.

In the deli section I came upon a kind employee named Latasha who was cutting off thick slices of corn and carrot souffles for a chatterbox of a customer named Dorothy. The woman lives in the Bronx, but she was in the neighborhood for a doctor’s appointment and decided to pass some time in the supermarket. “I came here to see what was going on,” she told me, before turning to ask Latasha, “Can I get another taste of the carrot souffle?”

Latasha obliged, smiling. While she was at it, she gave me a taste, too.