A Man Who’s Going to Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store
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The store that resulted is called Harvest Market, which opened in 2016. It’s south of downtown Champaign, Illinois, out by the car dealerships and strip malls; 58,000 square feet of floor space mostly housed inside a huge, high-ceilinged glass barn.
Harvest Market is the anti-Amazon. It’s designed to excel at what e-commerce can’t do: convene people over the mouth-watering appeal of prize ingredients and freshly prepared food.
Since Amazon is Whole Foods, it doesn't sound at all like the anti-Amazon.
When I was a youngin', our town didn't have any chain stores, just a dozen or so family markets.
I miss the culture and environment, not so much the lack of selection. Since then, it's hard to take sides in a Safeway vs Walmart vs Amazon brawl.
The first chain fast food (aside from the ubiquitous Dairy Queen) came somewhat later. That's a thing I think we could do without.
Me too. I truly miss those days, and make it a point to shop at the few remaining such markets in my town.
They also mention Niemann's relationship with the Whole Foods CEO pre-sale, and how Niemann didn't believe WF was doing enough to lower prices. Then the recession hit and Whole Foods nearly went out of business.
The anti-amazon part isn't in the design (as already said, the design predates the Amazon acquisition); its in the supermarket's direct relationship with local suppliers.
Now consider Trader Joe's. They have modest sized stores. They're rather plain. They offer mostly their own house brands. They don't have sales, coupons, delivery, or affinity cards. The prices are reasonable. The quality is OK. Dwell time is low; you can be in and out of a Trader Joe's in ten minutes. Checkouts go fast, partly because they don't have coupons or affinity cards to slow things down.
Whole Foods is chasing the top 10%. Trader Joe's is chasing the top 50%. Dollar General has the bottom 25%.
Whole Foods is too expensive and unpleasant, Walmart is too unpleasant, and Trader Joe's is too variable in terms of quality -- some of their stuff is great, some of it is awful, and it's hard to tell which by looking.
Their produce selection tends to be a lot cheaper than standard grocery stores too because they have separate supply chains and direct relationships with Asian owned farms.
Several local Asian chains have been moving into abandoned super market buildings in my area over the last 5 or 10 years, and I'm starting to see more and more non-Asian and non-Hispanic people shopping at them lately.
I think most traditional major supermarket chains have a higher markup on the "fresh things" like produce/meat/seafood but low prices on processed things + eggs + milk. Meanwhile the Asian groceries tend to have a low markup on produce/seafood but high markup on the processed things.
I just need to find a place to get meat and nice-ish cheese (currently stock up on store-brand cheese every two weeks at Trader Joes) for cheap. I don't miss small grocery stores at all, usually they were too expensive with poor quality produce/meat and very poor seafood selection in my experience.
It's not for everyone, the selection is going to be more limited, but it's so much faster and cheaper. We save around 20 - 25% buy shopping locally, there's simply less random items that go into the cart. While the large supermarkets have 5 minute lines and getting around results in shopping taking at least 30 minutes, the small grocery store reduces our once a week shopping trip to 10 minutes. Generally shopping at the large supermarkets have become extremely stressful, perhaps it always was, but now I know there's a better solution... And it's not online.
Online shopping for groceries currently doesn't work, shipping is to expensive, unless you only shop once a week... I do, but then they don't give me items that will last more than a few days. What am I suppose to do with 5L of milk that only last until Wednesday?
After having tried a small local grocery store I'm not sure I want to go back to the supermarkets.
Especially for the larger pack sizes, if they even have them at all.
More generally, Am I willing to save 30% on bread crumbs or soap if it means buying a 6-12 month supply up-front? Yes, that’s a great ROI!
4 or 5L of milk may be a problem (unless you freeze it). But I can go through a 10 lb bag of potatoes if I could only get them fresh.
This depends on the size of your home and the amount of storage space you have. I am generally unwilling to buy a 6+ month supply of household goods because real estate is significantly more expensive than toilet paper.
I was speaking for myself, and some of the hidden costs associated with buying in bulk.
I tried out Amazon's grocery offering out of curiosity. What made me realize that it wasn't for me was the large boxes that ended up on my doorstep. It was embarrassing and seemed really wasteful to me.
I'd consider my neighborhood grocery stores to be the 5,000-10,000sqfoot places scattered around the area so no home within a three mile radius is more than a 10 minute walk to one. They survive just fine by being cheaper than Amazon Fresh and significantly more convenient than the Walmart/Costco that exist on the outskirts of the city.
Yes, I understand that statement is antifreemarket and many people will disagree. I think people should take a more active approach to shaping their local communities.
The real threat would be an Aldi, since those guys are cheaper and have a fantastic selection.
The very high-end grocery stores are doing about the same as they always have. The bulk/budget grocery stores are doing better than ever. It's the ones in the middle that seem to be dying.
I'm not sure how much of this can be placed at Amazon's feet. Amazon's grocery offerings seem to be geared toward the high-end.
However small town grocery stores which sell everything from toothpaste to cereals are in big trouble, I have watched 2 of them getting closed because of lack of customers. A big issue is also lack of smart software that can guide inventory decisions. They usually have ton of things that doesn’t fly off the shelves while customers getting disappointed with not finding things. You would expect these stores to have optimization software that identifies losers and replaces it with better options but they don’t. I would see them consistently run out of some product every Wednesday and not getting it replenished for rest of the week. I would think their software would detect this and get that item more but that would never happen!
They can probably still stay alive if they had smarter software.
If anything, this strikes me as a response to Hy-Vee's continued growth. Much of Harvest Market takes aims at design themes Hy-Vee has bee pushing for a decade now.
I wish NFI luck but given their struggles in their home market, I'm not sure this is the Hail Mary they need.
Short order meal prep is where the real money is.. the UK specifically London is a prime example.
This was honestly a dig at leaving no evidence of why Wegmans was better. I'm sure it is.
Basically it's about marketing firms trying to convince supermarket owners that inefficient layout and cute themes will save the day. All sorts of stuff is to be feared: millennials who prefer restaurants or Amazon (and won't age out of it by starting families), the giant Walmart monster, etc.
So make the customers zig-zag around a store, kind of like shopping at JCPenny or Macy's, or maybe even a casino. Take up space with weird stuff, like corrugated steel around the milk to evoke farm nostalgia. Create a mock up of an urban deli, complete with an awning that is hopefully useless under the supermarket's roof.
Evidently people like me are undesirable customers, because I hate all that stuff.
But then again, it's the best grocery store to visit if you're a kid (or a kid at heart) and people make it a point to visit from across the country whenever they are in the area.
One thing that really irritates me is "lifestyle aisles". I do not organize my shopping list by whether the food is "ethnic" or "health-conscious". To me, hoisin sauce is not "Asian foods"; it is a condiment. It's the same as Worcestershire sauce, barbecue sauce, ketchup, or mustard. Canned frijoles negros are exactly the same as canned black beans, so why are they in different aisles? If I want Cap'n Crunch and also a gluten-free hippy cereal with a happy gorilla on the box, they should both be in the same aisle. Put the lo mein next to the spaghetti, and the golden syrup next to the sugar, and the matzoh next to the Wasa. I shouldn't have to bounce between different random aisles to complete a shopping list organized by the type of food, rather than by the type of person who typically eats it.