New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

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Alpha8472
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New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by Alpha8472 »

A new Lucky Supermarket will open in the Bayview Neighborhood of San Francisco.

It will be operated by Save Mart Supermarkets. The store will be in the former Walgreens space in Bayview Plaza. It will be a 9,500 square foot supermarket compared to the average 30,000 square foot Lucky supermarket in Northern California.

Previously a Fresh and Easy was in the shopping center. That store was taken over by an independent supermarket that closed 3 years later.

https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Luc ... 007610.php
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Re: New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by storewanderer »

Alpha8472 wrote: March 16th, 2022, 8:11 pm A new Lucky Supermarket will open in the Bayview Neighborhood of San Francisco.

It will be operated by Save Mart Supermarkets. The store will be in the former Walgreens space in Bayview Plaza. It will be a 9,500 square foot supermarket compared to the average 30,000 square foot Lucky supermarket in Northern California.

Previously a Fresh and Easy was in the shopping center. That store was taken over by an independent supermarket that closed 3 years later.

https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Luc ... 007610.php
The article mentions the only other stores around are FoodsCo (over a mile away which is far for a big city) and Grocery Outlet (not sure exactly where they are). So on paper this looks like a slam dunk.

Fresh & Easy opened this 14,000 square foot location in August 2011 (the first time a grocery store had been in the neighborhood in 20 years), and closed this location in September 2013; it was not transferred from Tesco to Burkle. Given this, and that other locations in San Francisco were transferred to Burkle, performance for this location must have been pretty terrible.

Then the city of San Francisco gave money to an independent grocer Duc Loi to take over the Fresh & Easy space in 2016. The independent grocer closed in 2019 citing crime and theft as issues. I think however the real issue for them was a lack of customer traffic and the wrong merchandising (too much Asian food). The Duc Loi had, literally, no traffic.

Given Walgreens also closed in 2019, I wonder why they closed...

I also find it strange Save Mart is not just moving into the existing grocery space. It is still empty and the city has been looking to throw money at someone to re-open it. It is also a larger space.
https://sfstandard.com/community/a-new- ... e-bayview/

This area has a significant history of very high crime (from appearances at this point in time, though, this area looks better than much of the area surrounding Union Square... and certainly smells better than the area surrounding Union Square), but really, it seems Food Maxx would be a better fit. I guess you can't do that in 9,500 square feet.

But there is actually an independent store a few blocks from this Save Mart site, called Super Save. It is not very large but at least when I was there it did have rather extensive (given my expectations going in) meat, produce, and limited deli; it was supplied by Unified/Supervalu. It was by no means a nice looking store, but the product mix offered basically constituted a legitimate basic conventional grocery store with ample fresh food available, and pricing was okay.
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Re: New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by veteran+ »

"Then the city of San Francisco gave money to an independent grocer Duc Loi to take over the Fresh & Easy space in 2016. The independent grocer closed in 2019 citing crime and theft as issues. I think however the real issue for them was a lack of customer traffic and the wrong merchandising (too much Asian food). The Duc Loi had, literally, no traffic."

Yep, it never approached even close to $100,000./week.

Also I think the location was not right.
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Re: New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by HCal »

9,500 square feet? That's hardly a supermarket, more like a big convenience store.

But it's great that they are giving this neighborhood a chance. Save Mart has upped their game the last few years, it seems.
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Re: New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by storewanderer »

veteran+ wrote: March 17th, 2022, 9:42 am "Then the city of San Francisco gave money to an independent grocer Duc Loi to take over the Fresh & Easy space in 2016. The independent grocer closed in 2019 citing crime and theft as issues. I think however the real issue for them was a lack of customer traffic and the wrong merchandising (too much Asian food). The Duc Loi had, literally, no traffic."

Yep, it never approached even close to $100,000./week.

Also I think the location was not right.
Do you think by going into (the more visible, with a parking lot) Walgreens space, may make a difference?

The Fresh & Easy space was sort of hidden, parking was via (free) garage...

$100k a week in a 14k square foot space is terrible (but maybe for F&E that was pretty good) but then again Duc Loi was city subsidized (was F&E subsizdied too)? but I know of a place that I am sure was doing less than $100k a week with a 60k square foot space for about the past year...
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Re: New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by storewanderer »

HCal wrote: March 17th, 2022, 5:47 pm 9,500 square feet? That's hardly a supermarket, more like a big convenience store.

But it's great that they are giving this neighborhood a chance. Save Mart has upped their game the last few years, it seems.
I think it is more Save Mart has finally gotten people in leadership positions who know what they are doing and have been given the power to do the right things to get the stores more competitive again. Not just in price, but in mix, quality control, too.

Save Mart "worked" fine before the Albertsons purchase. They seem to have gotten somewhat back to that level they were at back before then with decent quality, decent prices... service/attitude is definitely not the same now as it was back then in their original stores, but compared to competition at the present time it is fine.
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Re: New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by veteran+ »

storewanderer wrote: March 17th, 2022, 10:19 pm
veteran+ wrote: March 17th, 2022, 9:42 am "Then the city of San Francisco gave money to an independent grocer Duc Loi to take over the Fresh & Easy space in 2016. The independent grocer closed in 2019 citing crime and theft as issues. I think however the real issue for them was a lack of customer traffic and the wrong merchandising (too much Asian food). The Duc Loi had, literally, no traffic."

Yep, it never approached even close to $100,000./week.

Also I think the location was not right.
Do you think by going into (the more visible, with a parking lot) Walgreens space, may make a difference?

The Fresh & Easy space was sort of hidden, parking was via (free) garage...

$100k a week in a 14k square foot space is terrible (but maybe for F&E that was pretty good) but then again Duc Loi was city subsidized (was F&E subsizdied too)? but I know of a place that I am sure was doing less than $100k a week with a 60k square foot space for about the past year...
Location selection was one of F&E's most notable ineptitudes.

$150,000./week was their "breakeven". That store rarely reached $75,000./week.

I cannot verify but I doubt very much if F&E was subsidized. None of their stores were to my knowledge. Their hubris and ignorance was a function of that.

They could not even negotiate driveways or signs or anything about their location.
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Re: New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by buckguy »

Bayview is one of the poorest sections of SF and has been for many, many decades. The major employer was a Navy shipyard and some other military facilities--now gone, but having left behind all kinds of toxic waste that makes the area difficult to redevelop. It's also relatively isolated because it's cutoff by freeways and industrial uses, so the business district isn't going to be a huge draw from other neighborhoods. The proportion of the population from Asia has been growing (mostly people from Pacific Islands) but a successful market would need to serve a broader clientele.
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Re: New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by Groceteria »

This location, as I recall, is a bit north of Bayview/Hunters Point central. I imagine that the growing Third Street corridor through Dogpatch (and maybe even parts of Mission Bay) would be a big part of the intended market since I don't think there's really a full-line supermarket south of China Basin or east of the 280. Whether its small size would allow this to be a "full-line supermarket" remains to be seen, I guess...
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Re: New Lucky Supermarket To Open in San Francisco

Post by storewanderer »

I am thinking if Fresh & Easy, with zero perishable prep (maybe got the bakery oven but that was so small) was 14k square feet and this store is only 9.5k square feet I don't see how this store can have any perishable prep. And maybe that is part of the plan. They will prepare perishable elsewhere and bring it into this store. They will need to significantly cut inventory/mix.

In retrospect the Fresh & Easy was probably a pretty nice store. But it appears the problem was Fresh & Easy didn't work as a format and this location didn't have great visibility.

Save Mart had a Lucky then downgraded to Maxx Value Foods in a not great part of Oakland and it closed. It was small, but not this small. Maxx Value was clearly designed to address theft issues as it had a very limited mix, few high value items, and very low shelves. Felt like a pathetically lacking Grocery Outlet in there.

9.5k square feet sounds more like a convenience store than a real store. I guess if Save Mart does this 9.5k square foot space with basically no perishable prep (maybe throw in a tiny service deli), compacted front end (things like checkstands against the front wall), aisle-based produce (not island type displays), and high shelves, they may be able to get a pretty impressive mix into the store. Given the big city location no use wasting space on 12 roll packs of paper towels or 30 pound bags of charcoal, start to cut out oversized items and it makes a lot of room for smaller items.

I'm not sure how far above 10,000 square feet the Safeway in the Financial District is either... maybe that is their inspiration? That Safeway seems pretty complete.
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