Frys Marketplace Shea/Tatum Closing

[storewanderer]

I noticed this store is up on the auction site www.samauctions.com for late April. I guess it is closing.

[jamcool]

It's being converted into a Fry's Signature (upscale)..it was a Smitty's

A number of former Smitty's/Fred Meyers that were converted to Fry's Marketplaces are being changed to traditional Fry's stores...they are too small for the current Marketplace concept.

[storewanderer]

So they are decreasing the count of Marketplace stores? How are they handling this? Are they blocking off part of the sales space and eliminating the non food as they did with the one over in West Phoenix?

It appears the Signature Stores carry most, but not all, of the non food of a Marketplace Store. I was in a couple of those one down in Tucson and one in Scottsdale or something.

[ckellogg5]

From azcentral.com
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... s0805.html

Basically, the store will be a tear-down and rebuild. They actually are making the store larger than it is now going up from 114000 sf to 138000 sf. The store will actually offer more things than it does currently such as an expanded wine dept and sushi bar. Plus they will be offering a cooking school and a grill in the meat Dept.

[jamcool]

The store will be reopening in a few days as a Fry's Signature Marketplace

[ckellogg5]

They actually have a website set up for this store

http://www.frysfoodtatumshea.com/

You can see pictures of the store as they are building it and what I will look like when it opens.

[Brian Lutz]

There's a Flickr set with quite a few pictures on there, and it looks like they're taking a fair number of design cues from the Fresh Fare package (there's even a generic Fresh Fare logo used in one of the meat department pictures by itself, minus any other store logos.) This seems to be becoming pretty standard for high-end Kroger stores across the various brands.

[storewanderer]

Dry aged beef facility? Wine tasting room? Live tree in the dairy department? Chocolate fountain?

Kroger?

???

[Alpha8472]

All of these fancy departments are obviously attempts to cash in on the high-end grocery business. Whole Foods makes tons of money on expensive luxury foods. Kroger probably sees that there is a market for this in the area. I assume that there are very few Whole Foods stores nearby.

[Brian Lutz]

Even if Whole Foods is nearby, it is entirely possible that Fry's could be moving to try to compete more at their level. The area I recently moved to (Downtown Bellevue) has three grocery stores: A Whole Foods, a Safeway and a QFC. The Whole Foods seems pretty typical of the ones I've been to, but the Safeway and QFC seem to have a significantly higher end focus than other QFCs and Safeways in the area. This is mainly to cater to the neighborhood, which is fairly affluent in and of itself, but these stores are also some of the closest ones to people living in the very wealthy Clyde Hill and Medina neighborhoods.