Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by storewanderer »

It almost sounds like this store is on the verge of closing...

I can't help but notice in the Google photos how empty of customers it is.
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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by ClownLoach »

storewanderer wrote: October 26th, 2022, 9:59 pm It almost sounds like this store is on the verge of closing...

I can't help but notice in the Google photos how empty of customers it is.
The store was very much full of traffic early on because Bristol Farms did a great job of driving social media influencers there. They also did several preview events just for them, plus some after hours events once they opened. So a lot of those pictures were taken by influencers and they're of a store that isn't open to the public and as such aren't really accurate reflections of the traffic. There were already hundreds of pictures up two days before the ribbon cutting. This social media work probably didn't translate to a lot of big transactions, but it seems like Bristol Farms has not pushed for any more social media activities in the last few months. I think they needed to keep driving awareness of the store and probably shouldn't have used a secondary brand of "newfound market" because that wording makes me think of a second hand store. But they may have become frustrated with their store becoming a hangout for people to take pictures of fancy displays but not buy anything.

I suspect that Bristol Farms people are a bit smarter than the average bear though as they seem to be able to keep slow stores alive and fine as long as the rent is reasonable. Where they've closed in the past were locations that were high rent and diminishing traffic (Kaleidoscope, Westfield San Francisco, etc. type centers). We know this is likely top dollar rent and I suspect that they are pushing back on Irvine Company because the traffic they expected isn't coming. They are probably demanding a redone lease, rent reduction or something else because they have clearly spent a lot of money on this store - I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they spent $10 Million or more redoing that building to their format. I doubt that they would have make this investment if the traffic demographic data didn't support their business plan.

I do not think for a moment that the store itself is the issue as they really have made the right decisions that are needed in all the other Bristol stores - they removed the ultra luxury junk nobody is going to buy (like the giant vault of caviar they used to have in some locations, or full cases of luxury wagyu $100+/lb. Beef). They don't have much of the mainstream brand stuff besides Coke products as they know their customer can drive 500 feet to Target for Kraft dinner or Tide. The perimeter is really more grab and go which reduces payroll, less deli and bakery which reduces shrink, their first store with self checkout to reduce labor. Everything about this store makes sense as the logical evolution for the Bristol format (except for the food court but that could easily turn into concession space if they wanted to rent out the space vs continue to self operate the stalls).

I don't think that anything from a Ralphs to Gelson's to a 99 Ranch would be any more or less successful here. It's a location issue because the Spectrum is not delivering on the premise that a regional center normally does - guaranteed traffic. Format isn't the issue. In fact Bristol Farms is completely gutting and rebuilding their Long Beach Lazy Acres store - which isn't that old - and what little bit is done so far looks an awful lot like the Irvine Bristol Farms.

Irvine Company needs to tone down their advertising which basically makes them sound like the greatest retail centers in the known universe, worth paying substantial premiums to get into. Spectrum isn't Ala Moana yet they sell it on the same level. The rumors were that the Hobby Lobby that closed after just a year was the same kind of situation - it turned into a major dispute and Irvine Company let them out of the lease. It's obvious that store grossly underperformed past grand opening and probably was losing massive amounts of money because of ultra high rents. I think the Hobby Lobby situation is what pushed them to propose removing that area of the Market Place and replace with apartments; I don't believe for a minute the apartment proposal came before whatever transaction occurred that released HL from their brand new lease. In fact that story may have been a cover for the dispute. But HL probably spent a tiny fraction of what Bristol did on this store - I would imagine that Irvine Company knows this store is "too big to fail" as it would seriously harm the reputation of Spectrum Center with future tenants and cost them their ability to sell top tier plus rents. They're better off making whatever concessions Bristol may want due to the lack of expected traffic. If I was Bristol Farms - I would want pedestrian gates of some sort to make sure that the parking spaces in front of the store are truly "dedicated parking.". Irvine Company tweaked the parking lots and removed many of the entry lanes - making more of a high speed Boulevard around the center. This means there are fewer places to turn in for parking and creates more congestion. If you enter along the I-5 side the first entry lane you see is the one that leads to Bristol Farms, and that might encourage customers of the entire mall to fill up their lot first. Many people are resistant to using parking structures where surface lots exist. I also find it interesting that all work has stopped on the former Walmart that was becoming Bass Pro. They put wraps on the windows for Bass Pro but nothing else is happening. They're supposed to be opening in early 2023 and clearly for their type of lavishly constructed store there is no way they could make Christmas 2023 without starting 24/7 construction right now. Wonder if they're getting cold feet?
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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by rwsandiego »

ClownLoach wrote: October 26th, 2022, 9:54 am
storewanderer wrote: October 25th, 2022, 9:34 pm
Bagels wrote: October 25th, 2022, 5:12 pm Irvine Company just sent all of tenants an e-mail survey. The topic is very clearly 'why aren't you shopping at Bristol Farms.' I've never received a survey like that from them in the ~20 years I've leased from them....not good!
It is simple, the store has too much perimeter, it is too high priced, and lacks foot traffic.

Customers don't even know they can get their regular groceries there because the upper end/gourmet stuff overwhelms the regular stuff. Or perhaps the regular groceries are priced too high so that is the problem.

The store is very nice, however, it is trying to do too many things, for too many people. If they could use the strategy Wegmans uses and basically SKU cut center store in a very clever manner plus get center store pricing down to Wal Mart type levels (like Wegmans does), then they would get the foot traffic into the store and that foot traffic would purchase from the very attractive perimeter as well.

But these California grocers and California grocery wholesalers- they don't get it. They are so greedy when it comes to price, they think people will flock to their store to buy $6 packages of Oreos and $6 bags of Lay's Chips, and pick up some $9 12pk of Coke to wash it all down. It doesn't work like that.

Even if they just tried to price center store like Stater (along with some commodity type meat/produce like Stater) they could probably get the foot traffic necessary to make the perimeter work.

The whole problem is the inability of these small California chains to have a grocery wholesaler who is willing to support a competitively priced center store program. W OR/W WA independents have a similar challenge. I feel bad for them. If they were over in Utah, out in Eastern Washington, or anywhere in the rest of the US, they wouldn't have this problem.

We can say what we want about a perimeter heavy store but at the end of the day there is significant floor space devoted to center store and profits from center store sales which still make up 50%+ of sales in a strong store (even one with heavy perimeter) are very profitable and help subsidize all of the waste and labor that nice perimeter costs.

Maybe Bristol can go ahead and downsize the floor space and go to a perimeter only type format plus a very abbreviated center store like they had in San Francisco, but I'm not sure that would work here either.
Having spent a decade in Irvine it is very obvious that the Spectrum Center is completely dependent on three categories of customers, all of which are in very short supply lately for various reasons. First is the office customer who comes over with the company credit card and expenses a two hour long "business luncheon meeting.". The office towers throughout the area are still empty, and when these companies start to get to the end of their leases the situation is going to be a lot worse when they don't renew. The Spectrum Center used to be as crowded at lunchtime as on a busy Friday night with a new Marvel comics movie release, which brings me to the second problem.

Spectrum Center was the cash cow of the Edwards Theaters circuit. At one point it was one of the highest grossing movie theaters in the USA. But it was then neglected by Edwards and became run down, then Regal came in and performed a very prolonged remodel which disrupted the entire building for almost two years and cheapened up the operation, and then it was ready to reopen but COVID hit. This theater, despite the fact that there are many alternatives in the area, brought in incredible levels of foot traffic to Spectrum until now. Regal basically pushed customers into other theaters including their competition and they didn't return. The traffic this theater used to generate carried the entire shopping center 7 nights a week.

The last issue is that they had one of the strongest performing Target stores in the market, but then they decided to replace their surface parking lot with a parking structure. This left the Target store for a couple of years with less parking available than a typical grocery store. That once again disrupted customer traffic to the Spectrum as customers found other destinations to shop and many didn't return. This Target was given their "top tier" remodel in an attempt to bring back customers but clearly that didn't work either; it has never been as busy as it was prior to the parking structure construction.

Irvine Company has done an excellent job of selling tenants on the legacy of this center, signing them to top rents at Spectrum Center. But the failure rate of businesses there over the last few years, even Pre COVID, is stunning. Through bad luck (COVID) and mismanagement they have managed to reduce the traffic dramatically, I would say more than a 50% reduction, from where it was. It used to be nearly impossible to find a parking space except for the far end where Target is, now you can park in less than a minute in the main garage by Regal any day or night. When they sign a business like Bristol Farms to open up a flagship store, they give them the average demographics and traffic numbers which do not take into account the drastic fall off in traffic in most recent times. So the tenant crunches the numbers and they work for their business plan, but those demographics and traffic are not even close to accurate and as such the store doesn't meet expectations. Every retail landlord operates this way, giving really shady projections that are hard to validate or invalidate unless you have boots on the ground and really study the site with your own eyes. You would be amazed at how many retailers will build their entire business plan on road traffic numbers and sign a lease based on them - not realizing that in many cases the busiest roads are like mini highways and people do not stop to shop on said road because it is too busy!

There are other issues too such as the elimination of the free shuttle busses from the surrounding hotels and apartments; it was always nice to be able to go hop on a quick shuttle ride to go over and have a few drinks at Yard House without worrying about getting home safely. Then they got greedy and combined routes so it was like taking a city bus cross county and took half an hour to literally get to the other side of I-5. They couldn't figure out why people stopped taking the free shuttle and they halted service with COVID but never brought it back. Also the fact that they have jacked rents through the roof at their apartment communities means that their tenants don't have as much free cash available to spend at the Spectrum or anywhere else. My apartment I vacated at around $2800/month was listed at $3600 the day I turned in my notice. The expected turnaround time from vacancy was only 7 days so it wasn't going to be remodeled and believe me that it was not worth $3600 with a scenic view of the trash dumpsters. When you hear stories in the news about people turning in hundreds of applications for apartments in LA and OC but they can't get a single unit due to all the competition - that isn't happening at Irvine Company apartments at all. Their sky high rents are turning into unfilled vacancies which again take away from their shopping center traffic.

When I was still a tenant of their apartments earlier this year I also received a detailed survey that basically amounted to the same thing but a broader message of "You're basically across the street from the Spectrum, why don't you shop and dine there anymore?"

These guys have killed the Golden Goose.
It is hard to fathom that Irvine Company could have made the parking and access situation at Irvine Spectrum any worse than it was. When I still lived in San Diego, I tried to stop at the Target on the way home from LA. I could not find ANY parking. It was like they deliberately designed the place to have less parking than is necessary for a center this size. It is no wonder Bristol farms and Target are seeing less foot traffic.
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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by Bagels »

ClownLoach wrote: October 27th, 2022, 12:43 am
storewanderer wrote: October 26th, 2022, 9:59 pm It almost sounds like this store is on the verge of closing...

I can't help but notice in the Google photos how empty of customers it is.
The store was very much full of traffic early on because Bristol Farms did a great job of driving social media influencers there. They also did several preview events just for them, plus some after hours events once they opened. So a lot of those pictures were taken by influencers and they're of a store that isn't open to the public and as such aren't really accurate reflections of the traffic. There were already hundreds of pictures up two days before the ribbon cutting. This social media work probably didn't translate to a lot of big transactions, but it seems like Bristol Farms has not pushed for any more social media activities in the last few months. I think they needed to keep driving awareness of the store and probably shouldn't have used a secondary brand of "newfound market" because that wording makes me think of a second hand store. But they may have become frustrated with their store becoming a hangout for people to take pictures of fancy displays but not buy anything.

I suspect that Bristol Farms people are a bit smarter than the average bear though as they seem to be able to keep slow stores alive and fine as long as the rent is reasonable. Where they've closed in the past were locations that were high rent and diminishing traffic (Kaleidoscope, Westfield San Francisco, etc. type centers). We know this is likely top dollar rent and I suspect that they are pushing back on Irvine Company because the traffic they expected isn't coming. They are probably demanding a redone lease, rent reduction or something else because they have clearly spent a lot of money on this store - I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they spent $10 Million or more redoing that building to their format. I doubt that they would have make this investment if the traffic demographic data didn't support their business plan.

I do not think for a moment that the store itself is the issue as they really have made the right decisions that are needed in all the other Bristol stores - they removed the ultra luxury junk nobody is going to buy (like the giant vault of caviar they used to have in some locations, or full cases of luxury wagyu $100+/lb. Beef). They don't have much of the mainstream brand stuff besides Coke products as they know their customer can drive 500 feet to Target for Kraft dinner or Tide. The perimeter is really more grab and go which reduces payroll, less deli and bakery which reduces shrink, their first store with self checkout to reduce labor. Everything about this store makes sense as the logical evolution for the Bristol format (except for the food court but that could easily turn into concession space if they wanted to rent out the space vs continue to self operate the stalls).

I don't think that anything from a Ralphs to Gelson's to a 99 Ranch would be any more or less successful here. It's a location issue because the Spectrum is not delivering on the premise that a regional center normally does - guaranteed traffic. Format isn't the issue. In fact Bristol Farms is completely gutting and rebuilding their Long Beach Lazy Acres store - which isn't that old - and what little bit is done so far looks an awful lot like the Irvine Bristol Farms.

Irvine Company needs to tone down their advertising which basically makes them sound like the greatest retail centers in the known universe, worth paying substantial premiums to get into. Spectrum isn't Ala Moana yet they sell it on the same level. The rumors were that the Hobby Lobby that closed after just a year was the same kind of situation - it turned into a major dispute and Irvine Company let them out of the lease. It's obvious that store grossly underperformed past grand opening and probably was losing massive amounts of money because of ultra high rents. I think the Hobby Lobby situation is what pushed them to propose removing that area of the Market Place and replace with apartments; I don't believe for a minute the apartment proposal came before whatever transaction occurred that released HL from their brand new lease. In fact that story may have been a cover for the dispute. But HL probably spent a tiny fraction of what Bristol did on this store - I would imagine that Irvine Company knows this store is "too big to fail" as it would seriously harm the reputation of Spectrum Center with future tenants and cost them their ability to sell top tier plus rents. They're better off making whatever concessions Bristol may want due to the lack of expected traffic. If I was Bristol Farms - I would want pedestrian gates of some sort to make sure that the parking spaces in front of the store are truly "dedicated parking.". Irvine Company tweaked the parking lots and removed many of the entry lanes - making more of a high speed Boulevard around the center. This means there are fewer places to turn in for parking and creates more congestion. If you enter along the I-5 side the first entry lane you see is the one that leads to Bristol Farms, and that might encourage customers of the entire mall to fill up their lot first. Many people are resistant to using parking structures where surface lots exist. I also find it interesting that all work has stopped on the former Walmart that was becoming Bass Pro. They put wraps on the windows for Bass Pro but nothing else is happening. They're supposed to be opening in early 2023 and clearly for their type of lavishly constructed store there is no way they could make Christmas 2023 without starting 24/7 construction right now. Wonder if they're getting cold feet?
It's a very nice store, but they tried to create a destination market whose centerpiece food hall would service locals, office workers and visitors, and whose grocery would serve locals (there's lots of frozen and refrigerated items that most people who live far from the Spectrum Center aren't buying). With most office workers continuing to work from home, the food hall is suffering. But who wants to do their regular shopping here? If I'm at the Spectrum, I might pick up some items... but in the evening or on a weekend afternoon, I could drive to Albertsons, grab my groceries and return home before I'd even find parking at Bristol Farms. Yes, there's dedicated parking, but there's also a dedicated carpool lane on the 405/some of the 5, but there's no enforcement, so it doesn't matter.
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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by ClownLoach »

Bagels wrote: October 27th, 2022, 7:14 pm
ClownLoach wrote: October 27th, 2022, 12:43 am
storewanderer wrote: October 26th, 2022, 9:59 pm It almost sounds like this store is on the verge of closing...

I can't help but notice in the Google photos how empty of customers it is.
The store was very much full of traffic early on because Bristol Farms did a great job of driving social media influencers there. They also did several preview events just for them, plus some after hours events once they opened. So a lot of those pictures were taken by influencers and they're of a store that isn't open to the public and as such aren't really accurate reflections of the traffic. There were already hundreds of pictures up two days before the ribbon cutting. This social media work probably didn't translate to a lot of big transactions, but it seems like Bristol Farms has not pushed for any more social media activities in the last few months. I think they needed to keep driving awareness of the store and probably shouldn't have used a secondary brand of "newfound market" because that wording makes me think of a second hand store. But they may have become frustrated with their store becoming a hangout for people to take pictures of fancy displays but not buy anything.

I suspect that Bristol Farms people are a bit smarter than the average bear though as they seem to be able to keep slow stores alive and fine as long as the rent is reasonable. Where they've closed in the past were locations that were high rent and diminishing traffic (Kaleidoscope, Westfield San Francisco, etc. type centers). We know this is likely top dollar rent and I suspect that they are pushing back on Irvine Company because the traffic they expected isn't coming. They are probably demanding a redone lease, rent reduction or something else because they have clearly spent a lot of money on this store - I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they spent $10 Million or more redoing that building to their format. I doubt that they would have make this investment if the traffic demographic data didn't support their business plan.

I do not think for a moment that the store itself is the issue as they really have made the right decisions that are needed in all the other Bristol stores - they removed the ultra luxury junk nobody is going to buy (like the giant vault of caviar they used to have in some locations, or full cases of luxury wagyu $100+/lb. Beef). They don't have much of the mainstream brand stuff besides Coke products as they know their customer can drive 500 feet to Target for Kraft dinner or Tide. The perimeter is really more grab and go which reduces payroll, less deli and bakery which reduces shrink, their first store with self checkout to reduce labor. Everything about this store makes sense as the logical evolution for the Bristol format (except for the food court but that could easily turn into concession space if they wanted to rent out the space vs continue to self operate the stalls).

I don't think that anything from a Ralphs to Gelson's to a 99 Ranch would be any more or less successful here. It's a location issue because the Spectrum is not delivering on the premise that a regional center normally does - guaranteed traffic. Format isn't the issue. In fact Bristol Farms is completely gutting and rebuilding their Long Beach Lazy Acres store - which isn't that old - and what little bit is done so far looks an awful lot like the Irvine Bristol Farms.

Irvine Company needs to tone down their advertising which basically makes them sound like the greatest retail centers in the known universe, worth paying substantial premiums to get into. Spectrum isn't Ala Moana yet they sell it on the same level. The rumors were that the Hobby Lobby that closed after just a year was the same kind of situation - it turned into a major dispute and Irvine Company let them out of the lease. It's obvious that store grossly underperformed past grand opening and probably was losing massive amounts of money because of ultra high rents. I think the Hobby Lobby situation is what pushed them to propose removing that area of the Market Place and replace with apartments; I don't believe for a minute the apartment proposal came before whatever transaction occurred that released HL from their brand new lease. In fact that story may have been a cover for the dispute. But HL probably spent a tiny fraction of what Bristol did on this store - I would imagine that Irvine Company knows this store is "too big to fail" as it would seriously harm the reputation of Spectrum Center with future tenants and cost them their ability to sell top tier plus rents. They're better off making whatever concessions Bristol may want due to the lack of expected traffic. If I was Bristol Farms - I would want pedestrian gates of some sort to make sure that the parking spaces in front of the store are truly "dedicated parking.". Irvine Company tweaked the parking lots and removed many of the entry lanes - making more of a high speed Boulevard around the center. This means there are fewer places to turn in for parking and creates more congestion. If you enter along the I-5 side the first entry lane you see is the one that leads to Bristol Farms, and that might encourage customers of the entire mall to fill up their lot first. Many people are resistant to using parking structures where surface lots exist. I also find it interesting that all work has stopped on the former Walmart that was becoming Bass Pro. They put wraps on the windows for Bass Pro but nothing else is happening. They're supposed to be opening in early 2023 and clearly for their type of lavishly constructed store there is no way they could make Christmas 2023 without starting 24/7 construction right now. Wonder if they're getting cold feet?
It's a very nice store, but they tried to create a destination market whose centerpiece food hall would service locals, office workers and visitors, and whose grocery would serve locals (there's lots of frozen and refrigerated items that most people who live far from the Spectrum Center aren't buying). With most office workers continuing to work from home, the food hall is suffering. But who wants to do their regular shopping here? If I'm at the Spectrum, I might pick up some items... but in the evening or on a weekend afternoon, I could drive to Albertsons, grab my groceries and return home before I'd even find parking at Bristol Farms. Yes, there's dedicated parking, but there's also a dedicated carpool lane on the 405/some of the 5, but there's no enforcement, so it doesn't matter.
Tonight I stopped by since I was in the area. At 6pm the store is dead - but really the entire Spectrum Center is dead too except for Target. They clearly are bending over backwards for Bristol Farms. There is a dedicated crossing guard from Irvine Company in front of the store, and a dedicated security guard on a golf cart asking everyone who parks in the parking spaces marked as "Bristol Farms only" if they are actually shopping there.

Zero tables occupied in the fancy pizzeria. Nobody ordering from anything in the food court. Nobody shopping any other service department either.

So when the store first opened their dedicated parking was always filled up. Now that they have dedicated enforcement it is really too late - customers in the area already had bad experiences trying to park here, and nobody was going to push a grocery cart all the way to the Spectrum Garage and take an elevator to the 4th floor.

This is really the fault of Irvine Company - clearly they promised customer traffic and demographics that simply are not there - Bristol built a store that caters to them - and as a result its a disaster.
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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by storewanderer »

Personally, if a security guard questioned me as to if I was patronizing the business in question as I was exiting my vehicle and walking toward the business, I'd be annoyed. I would likely not return there based on those grounds alone. There has to be a better way to patrol this... but I don't have any ideas.

How is the service and condition of the perimeter departments in the store? Do the employees seem upbeat, or is it obvious from a customer standpoint the place is struggling and you can see it in the employees?

I just wonder how long they can let this continue financially...
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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by ClownLoach »

storewanderer wrote: November 1st, 2022, 11:51 pm Personally, if a security guard questioned me as to if I was patronizing the business in question as I was exiting my vehicle and walking toward the business, I'd be annoyed. I would likely not return there based on those grounds alone. There has to be a better way to patrol this... but I don't have any ideas.

How is the service and condition of the perimeter departments in the store? Do the employees seem upbeat, or is it obvious from a customer standpoint the place is struggling and you can see it in the employees?

I just wonder how long they can let this continue financially...
I do not see any major changes to assortment, layout, addition or removal of categories, or any other change that would indicate that Bristol thinks they have the wrong product mix. But inventory levels overall were reduced from what I am used to seeing at their other stores like Newport and Yorba Linda. I would also mention again that they must feel very confident about this new format as they're actively constructing a "newfound market" type setup for the Long Beach Lazy Acres store they operate - a store that was fully gutted and remodeled when it changed banners. This is the third, and probably most intensively changed version of that store which only opened in 1999. Millions of dollars each time. That one doesn't look like it will be done before 2023 although I think they originally planned on completing before Thanksgiving. I would go so far as to say that I would not be surprised if Bristol Farms started converting other successful stores to the Newfound Market prototype despite the struggle with this location - because it basically uses the square footage more efficiently than their traditional store and adds potential sales with the food court. It's pretty clear that the location is the main issue, but I thought about a few things that they did which may not have helped along the way.

Staffing was definitely reduced from previous levels. Previously each food court location had its own staff with custom branded uniforms - now the three stalls on the right side had from what I could tell just a single cashier in a Bristol Farms uniform. One cashier at the front and one at the back - the location really requires both front and back entrances but clearly this has a cost in payroll to supervise the self checkout pod at the back mall entrance.

Perimeter was stocked but definitely could see a reduction in the depth of inventory to reduce shrinkage. It seems like produce was fully jam packed but I think it is their best performing fresh category. Meat and seafood clearly had reduced what was cut and in the case - although it looks full for the customer it isn't layers upon layers of meat anymore. Same for deli which looked very thin. Still tons of sushi in jam packed cases - not sure if they didn't get the memo to reduce or if they are actually selling it but seemed odd to be so much product left at dinnertime.

I think they are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation with the parking. They won't get any full basket shops if the customer can't find easy parking up front. But they are annoying everyone with the questioning by the guard who is ensuring the dedicated parking. Not sure how you would solve this as their lot is the first surface lot you access off I-5 South, super easy to get into if space is available. Many people were turning right in and sucking up all this available parking for surrounding restaurants instead of using the parking structure. Again, parking structures and Orange County don't really mix well... The few shopping centers that have them still run into issues where surface lots fill completely while the structures remain at a fraction of capacity, even if the customer is driving right past a structure that is closer to their destination. Perception is that it takes longer to get in and out of structures and that they are not safe. Shopping centers that force use of structures generally have underperformed; famously South Coast Plaza had a years long waiting list but the Crystal Court expansion across the way with integrated, close structure parking was nearly vacant until they built a bridge from the massive surface lots of the main mall to the other side. Fashion Island has multiple lots which are surface level with an underground level; cars will circle and circle looking for a space but drive right past the ramp to the next level down that is completely empty. Kaleidoscope and Triangle Square have been duds for their entire existence because of parking structure use (although Kaleidoscope is exceptionally bad design and should have been demolished years ago). GardenWalk probably would have been a massive hit next to the Disneyland Resort except for again terrible parking structure configuration - it seems like none of the lot floors are aligned with the mall outside and you always have to take an elevator or stairs. It goes bankrupt every couple of years and I'm still convinced that Disney will find a way to buy it at bottom dollar just to tear it down and build a walkway to a third park - but of course the people who keep buying it are holding out for a Disney purchase hoping they can milk billions out of them.

Irvine Company had the same problem when they opened up Whole Foods at Fashion Island - their strategy there was to encourage customers to park in the nearby structure instead of the surface lot out front. They provided free golf cart shuttles to carry your groceries to your car but people didn't use them and ultimately they had to reorganize all the surface lots on that side of the mall to add capacity because grocery customers expect to be able to park right out front. Plus I'm sure that the presence of shopping carts in the garage doesn't work - a cart loose going down a ramp will accelerate quickly and cause serious damage or an accident if it hits a car or pedestrian.

I am still not convinced that the Target ever recovered from the loss of their main surface lot - even though surface level parking is at ground level in this structure, in the exact same place the old main lot was, with fairly easy ingress and egress, the structure is barely at half capacity even black Friday weekend. The small remaining lot without the structure is over packed and impossible to park in.
It's almost like they would have been better off to move to the closed Walmart on the other side of the freeway and build Bass Pro on the Target site.

Here they have made no attempt to encourage use of the parking structure for Bristol customers or do anything to make it easier for customers who do wind up having to park in it. The guard setup isn't a good solution. A gated lot would probably annoy the customers even if it was free and you just had to scan a bad code on your receipt to exit plus it isn't cheap to install such equipment.

And it is clear that the strong traffic the store was getting in the first few months was Instagram and TikTok followers as they aggressively used social media to market the new location - once they stopped paying inflencers to promote this site it plummeted immediately. Those folks collectively keep moving on to the next new thing and probably don't spend as much as Bristol would expect - and a regular traffic pattern failed to form during that time. This could be another reason for the problem - it felt like Amazon Fresh did initially when their flex shoppers would crowd the aisles and congest the store - but instead of workers picking online orders it was social media folks taking pictures of everything. Once again the regular customers they're looking to build up would certainly be turned off by this and as such not change their habits to shop there again.

What a mess.
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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by storewanderer »

I question if this location is possibly a good fit for a different grocer but it seems the bottom line is the parking situation just dooms the place.

Irvine has made some odd decisions lately when it comes to grocery stores. I suppose it is nice to get rid of tired concepts like Wal Mart and Albertsons and bring in more up and coming concepts like H Mart (???) and Bristol Farms, but I'm starting to wonder if this is really the right result.
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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by HCal »

Perhaps they should impose a fee for parking and then validate parking tickets inside. That's really the only situation I can think of. But I think it would be unprecedented for a supermarket in Orange County. It's rare even in LA.

I'm not sure if Irvine is trying to promote new "up and coming" businesses, or if they are just getting too greedy and think that upscale stores will pay higher rent. They seem to be forgetting that it's easy for residents to do their shopping in Costa Mesa or Santa Ana instead, and with the country going into a recession, even wealthy people are trying to save money.
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Re: Bristol Farms "Newfound Market"

Post by storewanderer »

HCal wrote: November 3rd, 2022, 11:25 pm Perhaps they should impose a fee for parking and then validate parking tickets inside. That's really the only situation I can think of. But I think it would be unprecedented for a supermarket in Orange County. It's rare even in LA.

I'm not sure if Irvine is trying to promote new "up and coming" businesses, or if they are just getting too greedy and think that upscale stores will pay higher rent. They seem to be forgetting that it's easy for residents to do their shopping in Costa Mesa or Santa Ana instead, and with the country going into a recession, even wealthy people are trying to save money.
I've seen the parking validation thing a number of times but for a supermarket it isn't optimal. It may be the only solution here though. One thing they can do is create a station within the store so you can validate your ticket self serve, place a validation machine at each checkstand/self checkout to insert your ticket to validate, etc. This would result in some non customers running in and validating but... getting some folks in the door to do this may translate into some extra sales...
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