If E Ă R 2 is a compact set of Hausdorff dimension greater than 5{4, we prove that there is a point x P E so that the set of distances t|x´y|u yPE has positive Lebesgue measure. 1 arXiv:1808.09346v1 [math.CA] 28 Aug 2018 the complications of replacing the upper Minkowski dimension by the Hausdorff dimension in the claim above.Falconer's distance problem can be thought of as a continuous analogue of a combinatorial problem raised by Erdős in [11]: given a set P of N points in R d , what is the smallest possible cardinality of ∆pP q. A grid is the best known example in all dimensions. In two dimensions, Guth and Katz [15] proved a lower bound for |∆pP q| which nearly matches the grid example (up to a factor of log 1{2 N ). In higher dimensions, there is a larger gap, and the best known result is due to Solymosi and Vu [35]. The Erdős distinct distance problem also makes sense for general norms and much less is known about it. In the planar case, if K is smooth and has strictly positive curvature, the best known bound says that if |P | " N , then |∆ K pP q| Á N 3{4 , with stronger estimates established by Garibaldi in special cases ([13]). There is a conversion mechanism to go from Falconer-type results to Erdőstype results that was developed by the second author together with Hoffman ([17]), Laba ([19]), and Rudnev and Uriarte-Tuero ([18]). It gives estimates for point sets that are fairly spread out. Applying the conversion mechanism to Theorem 1.3 we get the following corollary:Corollary 1.5. Let K be a symmetric convex body in R 2 whose boundary BK is C 8 smooth and has strictly positive curvature. Let P be a set of N points in r0, 1s 2 so that the distance between any two points is Á N´1 {2 . Then there exists x P P such that (1.1) |∆ K,x pP q| Ç N 4 5 .