For whatever reason, grocery stores are terrible for this. I can also think of the one near me at Windsor and Almon, which occupies an entire block that should be (and at one point surely was) relatively dense urban housing stock.
Even much bigger cities fall prey to this—
here's one in Toronto, near my old apartment, looking like a suburban spaceship landed on one of the busiest stretches of College Street. (Look around the adjacent blocks to see what the urban context is.)
I wonder if HRM has any planning rules in place nowadays to discourage this suburban-sizing/scaling of large-format stores in urban locations. Given that awful Rona that just opened on Almon, I doubt it.