Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
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RET AILING TODA Y Downtown bound CITY CENTERS ARE NO LONGER NO MAN'S LAND FOR SUPERMARKETS By Ben Johnson J 30 SCT / AUGUST 2012 renovation. The store is scheduled to open next spring. But the trend really got a shot in the UST BEFORE THE RECESSION, grocery store purveyors were enthralled with the suburbs, where a housing boom had rooftops proliferating. Then the markets caved, the jobless rate began to rise and grocery development shrieked to a halt. Now, after three years of a painfully slow recovery, grocery chains are doing the unthinkable: They are seriously looking at urban downtown locations. "There was so much momentum to do grocery development in the suburbs that downtowns were overlooked," said urban retail planning consultant Larry Kilduff, president of Kilduff & Associates. "Now those are going to get done." Grocery chains are gener- ally growing little, if at all, and this has meant a dearth of new downtown grocery store announcements. Supermarket chain Harmons, based in West Valley City, Utah, is opening downtown Salt Lake City's first full-service grocery store in 25 years, as part of the $1.5 billion City Creek retail project. And Harmons has solved an age-old impediment to downtown grocery development — parking — by putting the parking lot atop the store. Local grocery Marsh is opening its second store in down- town Indianapolis, a 40,000-square-foot facility that is slated to open next summer. Downtown Los Angeles, too, is get- ting a new grocery: Smart & Final Extra has signed a 20-year lease for 25,000 square feet on the ground floor of an office building at 845 S. Figueroa St. that is undergoing a $20 million arm in June, when Target Corp. an- nounced that it would open at least 10 downtown stores offering fresh produce under the City banner. The first of these opened in July on South State Street in downtown Chicago. Others are sched- uled for Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco by year-end. Grocery sales helped the company boost total sales by 3.7 percent last year. The challenge for potential downtown retailers involves serving two masters: a daytime population of office workers mainly craving prepared take-out food on the one hand, and a growing residential base of young professionals and empty WHOLE FOODS EMPLOYEE LISA PAMBID WATCHES DURING A GROUND-BREAKING CEREMONY FOR THE RETAILER IN DETROIT, MAY 14, 2012.