More about supermarkets

1. Sweetbay Supermarkets is a new concept from Delhaize/Kash n' Karry in Florida. The just opened Naples store is 44,000 square feet, "located at the intersection of Vanderbilt Road and Collier Boulevard will house a selection of over 58,000 items and offer customers a hybrid of a traditional grocery store and specialty shop items. " For a supermarket it's smaller (certainly smaller than the 80,000 square feet store that Whole Foods just opened in Austin) but where it offers guidance to urban commercial districts is its mix of regular and speciality items, with a great number of ethnic food items.

See the Sweetbay press release and "A Bright Day for Sweetbay" from from the Naples Sun Times.

2. On the pro-urb list there has been a thread on ethnic retail but it mutated into a discussion of supermarkets in the City of Chicago, which tend to be traditional suburban style parking fronted behemoths. Ken Obel, one of the creators and proprietors of the 22,000 sf. supermarket Fox & Obel, wrote this:

I will try not to be offended that Fox & Obel Food Market was left off of your list of Chicago supermarkets! (I am one of the founders.) In truth, I take our omission as a compliment, since we styled the store more as a specialty foods retailer (a la Zabar's or Fairway in New York City, where I hail from) than as a traditional "supermarket." (Fox & Obel occupies a 22,000 square foot space, large for a specialty food retailer but small compared to most supermarkets.)

I undertook designing and siting Fox & Obel, quite consciously, with urbanist principles in mind. We located the store in a rehabilitated turn-of-the century warehouse structure in Streeterville, a dense, vertical, rapidly growing residential neighborhood. The store comes right up to the sidewalk, and is oriented to the pedestrian in the neighborhood. It caters to the types of people that seek to live in walkable urbanist locales: younger professionals, empty nesters, "DINK's". We really wanted to become a neighborhood institution.

You are correct that parking is essential for a large retailer in Chicago. As a destination retailer, the store generates significant traffic, particularly on weekends, from distant neighborhoods, the suburbs and even out of state. These people, by and large, drive. Still, due to the choices that we made, the store probably gets more pedestrian traffic than any supermarket in the city (relative to our size and trade area). Indeed, I would bet that the store is largely responsible for a dramatic increase in pedestrian traffic in Streeterville -- though more retail is desperately needed to improve the quality of neighborhood life.

One might correctly point out that Fox & Obel has the luxury of engaging the streetscape, and avoiding an adjacent parking lot, because its parking spaces are located in a lot across the street. That having been said, that surface parking lot will, in coming years, be developed into additional high-rises, and the market's parking will migrate indoors.

______A rendering of how the market faces the street can be seen on the front page of the website and it's quite attractive. Photos of the exterior can be seen here and here, a supermarket style "cheesecake" photo is here, and this very personalized street entryway with a written cement signature and handprint of Ken Obel is here. (You sure aren't going to see that in the front of a Safeway or Kroger.) This is a screen print of a Chicago Sun-Times article back from when the store opened.________

Ken Obel closes by saying, I am glad to see some discussion of retail on this listserv. I do not see retail discussed very much in NU circles, yet it obviously plays a critical role in creating walkable, liveable places. There are also many challenges to doing retail successfully in a NU environment that are worthy of discussion.

3. Just to repeat, I think the 25,000 sf FreshMarket is also a good model for traditional commercial districts.