I have a couple of thoughts about the subsidized downtown grocery store under discussion.
1) Part of the subsidy is for extensive parking spaces, to match the easy parking at other stores. It seems to me that if people are already in their cars, in just 3-5 minutes they could drive to any of several existing large grocery stores, for example the new Rainbow store in north Minneapolis, or the old Minneapolis Moline site near Lake & Hiawatha, which has both CUB & Rainbow stores. All of those stores are bigger & with a larger selection than the proposed downtown store, and given their operating costs, I'd bet that their prices would be lower, too. 2) It seems that a large part of the expected customer base for a downtown grocery store is the anticipated 30,000 people living in downtown condos & apartments. But from the studies I've seen, these are the kind of people most likely to buy groceries over the internet or phone from Simon Delivers or similar companies. And most of them live in buildings with a doorman or someone to accept delivery of their groceries, which is the biggest drawback to this service in other neighborhoods. (The other drawback is price -- their grocery prices are high, but no higher than Byerly's or Lunds prices.) I worked for a while for SuperValu, the nations largest grocer. (They basically own SuperValu, CUB, Byerly's, Lunds, and a lot of other stores.) I spent a year traveling from Spokane, WA to Xenia, OH installing new warehouse ordering systems for them. The profit margin in groceries truly is razor thin, and the risks very high. I would really hesitate to invest any of my money in a grocery store. And the same goes for my tax money! Tim Bonham, Ward 12 _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
