DaveG wrote:It wouldn't be so bad if you drove a Prius

I always hear that line as the excuse for accepting mediocre supermarkets.

Over the course of the year, I hit regionally diverse locations like Moo and Oink on the Southside and cheese factories in Appleton. You don't make special trips. Rather, you stop when you are in the neighborhood or when you will be driving through.

Perhaps it depends on where you live. In some neighborhoods, WF is the most interesting store around.

In mine, I have a Garden Fresh and Harvest Fresh close by, as well as a Trader Joe's and a Costco. I can easily get to Shop & Save, Joe Caputo's, Meijer, and decent Korean and Mexican markets, and my regular routes frequently take me through Niles, with all its myriad shopping possibilities.

I'm not too far from a Whole Foods, but it rarely occurs to me to go there, because the things that they sell that I can't get just as easily somewhere else aren't that compelling to me. Since my local Jewel and Dominick's cut back from 24 hours, I hardly go to either of them, unless I happen to notice a sale flier with something appealing. (The loss leader that most frequently will get me to visit a store I don't go to often is a good price on Coca-Cola, and they don't sell that at Whole Foods!)

An interesting story, from the opposite end of the spectrum, appeared at the Chicago Tribune's web site today:

Michael Hughlett wrote:Aldi, which counts the Chicago area as its biggest U.S. market, is a breed of supermarket known as a limited assortment discounter. It carries only a fraction of the items offered in a conventional grocery store, and its shelves are dominated by Aldi's own store brands.

But Aldi claims it offers about 90 percent of the foods people buy most, and at prices up to 40 percent below those of conventional supermarkets, analysts say.

Aldi's formula for success: Small selection, low prices

The article also mentions that because Aldi is privately held, actual sales figures are not known but that estimated annual sales are $5.8B and that the chain, which typically adds about 50 stores per year to its roster will add closer to 100 this year. It also points out that Aldi has nearly double the number of stores in Chicagoland as Dominick's and only 27 fewer than market leader, Jewel.

I'm not sure what any of this means. I just thought that it was interesting because Aldi's approach is so completely different from WF's approach and perhaps because of it, they are well-positioned for the current economic climate.

=R=

Hi- I was listening to Marketplace on WBEZ last week, and on that day they were broadcasting from Ann Arbor. One of their segments was about a new Whole Foods that just opened up in Detroit proper. They mentioned that it was in midtown Detroit, and I looked it up and it is on Mack Ave. WF has two stores in Ann Arbor, and several stores in the more well to do suburbs, but it sounds like they have never placed a store in an area where many of the people that live near the store are on food stamps, and are living at the poverty level. They seem to think that they can make the store succeed though. It is a 21,000 square foot store. It will be interesting to see how well the store does. The city has lost a lot of inhabitants that have fled to the suburbs, and there has even been talk of converting some of the vacant land in Detroit into farms. I think there are a few small farms in the city right now. Hope this helps, Nancy

Hi- I just located the link to the Marketplace segment that took place on 6/5. According to the segment, the midtown section of Detroit, where the store is located, has a 50% poverty rate. Here is the link.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealt ... investment

This past Saturday, our family just spent the night in Detroit-in the Corktown area. A previously blighted area now inhabited with artists, hippies and yuppies moving in and rehabbing what is left. Vacant blocks turned into victory gardens. Wild pheasants have been seen on the city owned grass lots which do not get mowed. A small coffee shop with free trade coffee selling beans up to $20 a pound and a nice craft cocktail lounge and another upscale bar flank Slows BBQ. But the rest of the city... not too optimistic. What will help WF is Detroit's lower sales tax. I would not bank on its success unless it is close to the PalmerWoods area.

Hi- I know what you mean. One of my sisters is a doctor, and she went to med school at Wayne State, and she was offered a job there after she finished her fellowship in Seattle, and she said no way was she going back to Detroit. As far as she is concerned she thinks they should blow the city up, and start over again. When I told her a few years ago about the talk about having farms in Detroit proper, she said it could not get be any worse than what it was if they did that.

I hope Whole Foods succeeds there, but I have my doubts. From what I understand the city of Detroit is in receivership right now. I know when my sister lived in Detroit, the city was considered the murder capitol all four years she lived there. Thanks, Nancy

NFriday wrote:Hi- I was listening to Marketplace on WBEZ last week, and on that day they were broadcasting from Ann Arbor. One of their segments was about a new Whole Foods that just opened up in Detroit proper. They mentioned that it was in midtown Detroit, and I looked it up and it is on Mack Ave. WF has two stores in Ann Arbor, and several stores in the more well to do suburbs, but it sounds like they have never placed a store in an area where many of the people that live near the store are on food stamps, and are living at the poverty level. They seem to think that they can make the store succeed though. It is a 21,000 square foot store. It will be interesting to see how well the store does. The city has lost a lot of inhabitants that have fled to the suburbs, and there has even been talk of converting some of the vacant land in Detroit into farms. I think there are a few small farms in the city right now. Hope this helps, Nancy

I used to work within FIVE blocks of the store back in 1987-89 when I was at the Detroit Medical Center. To describe the neighborhood in the 1980s would be a HUGE medical center across the worst slum in Detroit and blocks upon blocks of empty fields. What was bizarre was that you could stand in the middle of the area and see three HUGE Catholic Churches that had served thousands of families at one point. The neighborhood was pretty wide open. The ONLY positive in the area was Eastern Market was about a mile away. The ONLY grocery in the neighborhood was a Farmer Jack's which was absolutely the WORST grocery I had ever shopped. Besides the lack of quality anything, they had a knack of having one cashier and literally thirty in line. It looked like a Russian grocery.

From 1990-2000, some of the slums were raised and they built housing for Wayne State and the medical school in the area. Think of the places in the South Loop but with huge fences and a lot of private security. When I was there in 2009, the housing had quadrupled. Some businesses like Pepsico took advantage of very generous tax incentives to build facilities in the area.

Whole Foods will survive in the area due to the increase of medium income housing in the area and the presence of the Wayne State University, the largest university in the US that no one has ever heard of. And it will survive in the area as there is NO real supermarket competition.

Having said that, their presence in the area will put more pressure on traditional merchants in the Eastern Market - places like Gratiot Central Market . It will also impact a lot of the high end vendors in the market like Cost Plus and EJ Hirt. In other words, the number of options in the area may decrease.

Hi- My sister lived on St. Antoine, right across the street from the med center. She said the immediate area was OK, but not great, but she would not walk three blocks at night from where she lived, and she did not even want to drive three blocks and get out of her car. She did mention about the lack of grocery stores in the neighborhood, and on occasion she would drive to the Eastern market on Saturday. You could get some really good deals there. One Saturday my sister and I helped my father sell peaches and apples there, and when we sold out, we got lots of veggies really cheap, which he ended up giving away to other relatives and people that worked on his farm. I remember that my experience selling at the Eastern Market was way different than what you would find at the Evanston market. I remember that somebody three stalls down from us was selling live chickens, which he killed on the spot. I never went down there to see the show, but you could tell everytime he made a sale.

NFriday wrote:Hi- My sister lived on St. Antoine, right across the street from the med center. She said the immediate area was OK, but not great, but she would not walk three blocks at night from where she lived, and she did not even want to drive three blocks and get out of her car. She did mention about the lack of grocery stores in the neighborhood, and on occasion she would drive to the Eastern market on Saturday. You could get some really good deals there. One Saturday my sister and I helped my father sell peaches and apples there, and when we sold out, we got lots of veggies really cheap, which he ended up giving away to other relatives and people that worked on his farm. I remember that my experience selling at the Eastern Market was way different than what you would find at the Evanston market. I remember that somebody three stalls down from us was selling live chickens, which he killed on the spot. I never went down there to see the show, but you could tell everytime he made a sale.

There are two types of vendors at Eastern Market. First, there are REAL FARMERS who produce the goods and bring them from their farms in SE Michigan and SW Ontario. To advertise as a farmer, you have to be one. Some of these vendors were some of the greatest people I ever found and introduced me to a lot of herbs and spices.

The second type of vendor is the surplus vendor - the people that would go around to all of the produce houses and buy the surplus. Those places tried to move produce at very low prices.

At 3 pm, it is a clearance sale. If you have the cash, you can buy the produce by the case loads for $2-10. Our favorite vendors were the live plant dealers as the prices were great at the end of the business day.

Personally, I would pass on the live chickens as there are several kill plants in the area that have better sanitation.

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There are also a couple of public markets in Windsor, ON that are pretty good.

Hi- I just saw on the 10 o'clock news tonight, that Whole Foods is going to locate a store in Englewood, which is considered a food desert. They expect the store to open up in about three years. Hope this helps, Nancy

Hi- There is an article in the Chicago Tribune about this new store. Here is the link.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ ... 8747.story

Apparently Whole Foods is also planning on opening up stores in Hyde Park, and Lake Forest, and they are scheduled to open up a store this November on Touhy in Park Ridge. WF is also looking at potential locations in Andersonville too. I am concerned that WF might be over saturating the Chicago area.

The Englewood store is going to be near Kennedy-King college, the home of Washburn cooking school, and they plan on hiring some Washburn students. The store in Englewood is supposed to be 18,000 square feet. Apparently the city had been wooing WF to move into an underserved area, and presented them with several other location possibilities which WF turned down before they proposed this location. Hope this helps, Nancy

Not included in the Trib story, which reads like a press release:

Whole Foods developer gets $10 million city subsidy

sundevilpeg wrote:Not included in the Trib story, which reads like a press release:

Whole Foods developer gets $10 million city subsidy

From the Trib article:

The city is contemplating providing about $10 million from a special taxing district for land preparation, utilities and environmental cleanup at the site, where 5 acres of retail development will be overseen by DL3 Realty, which is managed by Leon Walker. The company and Walker have donated more than $20,000 to aldermen and other South Side politicians.

The Englewwod store looks like a train wreck waiting to happen.

Great rant here.


Geo

NFriday wrote:Hi- There is an article in the Chicago Tribune about this new store. Here is the link.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ ... 8747.story

I am concerned that WF might be over saturating the Chicago area.

Hope this helps, Nancy

I've never lived close enough to a Whole Foods location to make it worth my time to travel to one regularly, but since I now live in Park Ridge, I will be interested to explore what they have to offer when they open this November. I'm sure they have tons of logistical studies showing how far apart their stores should be.

Hi- They have two stores in Evanston though, and they are only about a mile and a half apart. The South Evanston location though started as a Wild Oats though, and when WF bought out Wild Oats, they had requests to keep both the stores open. The downtown Evanston store is larger and much nicer. but all the parking is on the roof of the building, and so a lot of people including me do not like the parking lot. There are also several city lots in the neighborhood if you don't mind paying for parking.

I remember when Whole Foods bought out Oak Street Market, when they began doing business in Evanston, there were a ton of Oak Street Market customers that wanted them to keep that store open, because they were intimidated by a large store. WF decided that it was not economically feasible to keep both stores open.

Is the Park Ridge store going to be any where near Trader Joe's? I believe it is going to be on Touhy right? Thanks, Nancy

NFriday wrote:The South Evanston location though started as a Wild Oats though, and when WF bought out Wild Oats, they had requests to keep both the stores open.

Actually, IIRC, the South Evanston location began its life (after being a car dealership) as The People's Market, which was to be a second brand under Wild Oats. When that didn't go as management had hoped, it was changed to Wild Oats.

Earlier, Oak Street Market (in a building that had once been a gas station) was bought out by Fresh Fields, which built a store further north on Ridge, at a site that is now a condominium development. Fresh Fields was then bought out by Whole Foods, who closed the Fresh Fields store, because by that time the downtown Whole Foods, less than a mile away, had opened.

After that, Whole Foods bought out Wild Oats. leaving Whole Foods as the only "natural food" purveyor in town, demonstrating Whole Foods predatory nature.

It will be interesting to see what will happen with the South Evanston store, with the Jewel Osco store across the street, and the large, new Trader Joe's a block away.

The good news is that the original Oak Street Market building is scheduled for extensive remodeling, still maintaining the building's architectural style, becoming a large, destination, old-timey-style brewpub named Smiley Bros.

Hi- I forgot about the People's Market which was owned by Wild Oats, but I lived right down the street from Fresh Fields when it opened, and as I remember Fresh Fields did hurt Oak Street Market's business for a short while after it opened, but Oak Street Market rebounded after three or four months. I remember that the summer that Fresh Fields opened up, they had a $2 coupon for the store, with only a $2 minimum purchase. That summer I was living right next to the YWCA, and I acquired about 60 of these coupons, and so I would walk there almost every day to redeem a coupon. I got a lot of free or almost free food that summer. I believe it was in 1995 when Fresh Fields opened up on Ridge. When Whole Foods also decided to open up a store in Evanston, the owners of Oak Street Market saw the writing on the wall, and knew that there was no way they could compete with two other natural food stores in town, and approached Whole Foods about merging with them. I think a few months later, Fresh Fields asked to merge with Whole Foods. Here is a link I found at the Chicago Tribune website about this in 1996.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1996 ... -new-store

I like the way the article said that the WF store would have a full service restaurant and a cappuccino and espresso bar. Maybe they did serve cappuccino for a while, but now I think they only sell coffee, and they never had a full service restaurant at their downtown Evanston location.

I remember a few years after WF opened up in downtown Evanston, they had a town hall meeting, which I attended, and there were lots of fans of Oak Street Market that were angry that WF took them over. They liked the fact that Oak Street Market was small, and felt that WF was much more impersonal.

BTW- I am curious when the BBQ place is going to open up, because when I walk past the place, it looks like they are nowhere near ready to open up, and they were supposed to open up a few months ago.

HI- I just remembered that WF bought out Fresh Fields before they opened up their downtown Evanston location, and so for a few months they took over the Ridge location, and they then took over Oak Street Market. I was in Oak Street Market the last day they were open to look for bargains.

NFriday wrote:Hi-

Is the Park Ridge store going to be any where near Trader Joe's? I believe it is going to be on Touhy right? Thanks, Nancy

If you are familiar with the location of the Pickwick Theater in Park Ridge, I would say that the two stores are equidistant from that intersection -- headed north on Prospect, you would turn right on Touhy to go to Whole Foods (Touhy and Washington), or left on Touhy to go to Trader Joe's (basically Touhy and Summit).

Whole Foods could change traffic patterns in our little 'burb!

Hi- I just saw this on the Eater. Whole Foods is going to start testing a rewards program at its Princeton New Jersey store this month, and then is going to test it at all of its stores in the Philadelphia region by the end of this year. If the program works out, they will introduce the program nationwide by the end of 2015. The article says that Whole Food's stock has gone down 25%, due to the fact that they are receiving competition from stores like Walmart. Walmart is increasing their organic offerings, and selling them for less money than Whole Foods. I know there are people here that hate rewards programs. I think they are hoping to entice new customers. Here is a link to the story.

http://www.eater.com/2014/9/16/6575935/ ... g-who-knew

Hope this helps, Nancy