Jay Heights Grocery Store - The Real Story (23. April 2006, 09:03 by Derek Young) ~ A Changed World
A few weeks ago we told you that Jay Heights, a condo project on St. Helens, was going to be supersized and become the tallest residential project in the city. The News Tribune reported on it yesterday. Then I received an email this morning asking me, “Is downtown Tacoma going to have a grocery store like Safeway or Whole Foods?” Wait a minute. Condo projects are a dime a dozen in this town right now. Sure it’s tall. Whatever. A grocery store! That’s the real story here.
The Jay Heights developers are supposedly negotiating with grocers for the first floor commercial space. Who cares? This could be the long awaited grocery store that everybody’s been waiting for. Or could be a good first step grocery store to attract others to downtown.
Specifically looking at the question sent to me, my guess is that it’ll have to be a local grocer willing to take a risk on Tacoma. A Whole Foods or Safeway won’t be able to make the project pencil out. Whole Foods will want more of a retail core in the area, a higher density of a particular demographic, and better traffic flow. They’re a national chain and will have people staring at computer models trying to understand the 5/10 year projected growth of a location. An area in extreme transition is difficult to model. Plus, most Whole Foods tend to be in areas of retail density. So maybe once we have that downtown retail core in place, somebody like that would consider it. Safeway has the store on the hill. Thriftway has a store just north of downtown in Stadium District. Large retailers must consider things like freeway/large road visibility, accessibility, and demographics. It’s going to take someone with a vision and belief in Tacoma to drop a store on St. Helens. What would be perfect is to have somebody with the flexibility to grow and change the assortment as the neigbhorhood matures and changes. Start out simple and small. Grow it as business grows. We have to start somewhere.
Enough from me. Any thoughts?
Previously on Exit133
Link to The News Tribune
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As far as a grocery store, there are going to need to be alot more growth and changes in the area before it will likely be very viable, especially with Stadium Thriftway down the way.
Small grocers have a hard time.
However, I would not be surprised if a specialty store could make it.
Personally, I would really dig a natural/health/organic foods store. Is that the kind of specialty store that might work?
3 | Posted by James M | Apr 23, 07:38 PM
Doesn’t seem like the ideal “downtown grocery store” location—not too far from Thriftway and not really that close to any of the Downtown/UWT areas. Unless this store fills some specialty niche, I’m not sure it is a lot of help to the people living in the downtown area…
I would think if there were to be a new downtown grocery store it would be closer to the UWT area.. Stadium Triftway is only alittle over 4 blocks away from the Jay Heights project.
5 | Posted by Jake | Apr 24, 09:52 AM
check out the article in today’s TNT about the produce vendor, Golden Pear, at Freighthouse Square. I would rather see smaller local specialty shops like this than a Whole Foods or Trader Joes’s (not to say there is anything wrong with those):
http://www.thenewstribune.com/business/story/5689284p-5099352c.html
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