It was one of the few grocery stores on a really busy highway that saw massive traffic (literally the busiest road in the state). They should have done really well. At rush hour the highway is busy enough that you basically have to force yourself back into traffic and I'm sure that kept plenty of people from going in. And it was all but impossible to get out of that store and go south on Eagle Road.
It was down the street from an Albertsons and just up the street from the Boise Co-Op. If you were on your way home from work and drove by the Rosauers, you were probably also going to drive by the Albertsons and the Co-Op. Rosaeurs prices weren't any better (overall worse) so you probably just went with the default and kept going to the Albertsons. (This is a ~2000 Albertsons that was, I believe, the first one in the chain to have the garden center; it is a modern and established store). And Boise people are very loyal to the Co-Op.
My personal theory is that they identified that, for a time, Albertsons had stopped opening new stores in Boise and some emerging sections of suburbia were under-stored (especially since Fred Meyer seems not to want to open more than about one store per decade in the Boise area). So I think they saw an opportunity to fill in some gaps. Now Albertsons is growing again and Ridley's has also opened some stores.
So as to why it didn't work ... the store was never busy. The Huckleberry section was nice and they were a bit more ambitious in the deli than Albertsons, but it just didn't do all that much that any of the dozens of other Albertsons stores in the Boise area weren't already doing. I'm sure the lease was high, costs to get food down from Spokane was marginally higher, and trying to market 1 Rosauers store against all of the Albertsons locations was an uphill battle. It was a nice store and we liked it, but for whatever reason, it just didn't work. Prices weren't great. Maybe if they had given it more time and let more folks discover them, it would have worked. I don't know. Given car counts and the relative lack of supermarket options on Eagle Road, it should have done well. They must have just decided that their pockets weren't deep enough to wait for the store to become profitable.
retailfanmitchell019 wrote: ↑February 26th, 2021, 9:54 amTrader Joe's took over part of the closed Rosauers in Meridian, ID. Why did they fail there?Super S wrote: ↑February 26th, 2021, 8:24 am Back to the northwest....I am curious if Rosauer's will open more locations in western Washington. They have a new location in Ridgefield which should do well as it is the only true supermarket in town, and they have seen a HUGE influx of new homes. They did place the store well for growth. I personally would like to see another conventional grocer. Most independents have disappeared except for smaller towns, and the Thriftway name in southwest Washington and Oregon seems to be fading away (a different Thriftway than the Seattle area)