Citing Food Lion and Safeway aren't really good examples. Food Lion has always had small stores, small enough that Food Lion stores rarely get re-tenanted by grocery (I think Brookshire's may have moved into a few stores), only about half of the Houston ones became grocery (of some sort). Safeway OTOH benefits from a lot of stores being grandfathered in, with lasting legacies and areas dense enough to really support it (for example, the Rouses/former A&P is under 10,000 square feet, no way would Rouses or A&P be able to pull that off elsewhere). There's a good reason why stores built these days are over 30,000 square feet with very few exceptions, and this isn't one of them.wnetmacman wrote:I disagree. I have seen plenty of retailers do well with smaller stores. Food Lion doesn't necessarily do well, but they have been around far longer than many of their competitors and managed to survive. Safeway has plenty of 25-30K stores on the West coast that have run successfully for years, so if anybody could have pulled it off, Tom Thumb should have been them. A location in an office tower with a large Deli should have been the ideal store, as it would attract a lunch crowd and a late afternoon crowd. The Starbucks should have attracted a morning crowd for coffee. Something else wasn't right for it not to work, but I also know that Albertsons isn't a flexible company when it comes to offerings, and that could have come to haunt them.pseudo3d wrote:Let's be clear, unless it's a very specialized, successful grocer with skill in small stores, any retailer would have a tough time making a full-line sub-30k square foot store work, because once you start cramming perishables in (I'm not sure how accurate the newspaper is what with the Starbucks and all), the merchandise mix has to become highly abbreviated. The Fresh Market failed in Texas partly because of this. Remember, Tom Thumb bought two others as well and they haven't closed yet.
EDIT: I should also note that Tom Thumb's problems were compounded by it being below an office tower, not a residential tower.
Has anyone else heard of other closings beyond this, Denham Springs and Bossier City? I'm wondering if it isn't part of a larger group of closings.
Even if it did get office traffic, realistically it can't sustain itself on that alone. A convenience store, sure, but not a full-fledged supermarket. As for closures, this is probably the annual blood-letting from the South division and the South division alone (all divisions face it), although it did close Watauga earlier this year unannounced (maybe a lapsed lease). As an aside, it is a shame that the Randalls (Safeway) management really damaged the Louisiana stores when they were getting back on their feet, if they want a chance to get back into New Orleans via purchasing Winn-Dixie's stores, then Safeway style shenanigans will cause those stores to sink faster than a lead balloon.
You could point out that The Fresh Market survived here for about a year, but remember they closed ALL of their Texas stores, so this one could've been losing money hand over fist before Albertsons purchased it. But if that was the case, then you could make an argument as to why they bought it in the first place. Hmmm....