Strategies
Where supermarket developers have neglected some urban neighborhoods, city governments and non-profits can work together to market the potential of inner city areas to grocery store executives.
Since land is difficult for supermarkets to acquire, cities may survey commercially zoned land to create a database of suitable land parcels. Such a database may be used in an informational guide to provide to grocery store executives; Chicago’s planning department provided just such an information guide to executives at a grocers’ expo in 2005.
Cities should also keep in mind that it is more cost-effective for government, rather than for developers, to assemble land. The city and state can use their condemnation powers to assemble and acquire land; and policy-makers should remember that the state can increase supermarket attraction by offering 3-5 site packages instead of 1 site. Helping a supermarket to open more than one location can make the construction project seem more feasible, as it will help the chain shake up regional oligarchies and make short-term expenses seem more worthwhile. Leases developed with help from the city may also come without an “out” option in order to assure the grocery’s presence.
Such “packages” of three to five sites should include subsidies and streamlined approval. City planning departments should train staff members and make them conversant in retail. City workers within project approval departments should become conversant in retail, and the city can create programs in which “account managers” shepherd grocery store projects through the approval process.
Market leaders have chosen to close urban stores, even if they are showing a profit, to focus on the most productive stores in the suburbs. But “operators in second and third place in a metro area may seek to expand their core clientele outside the highly contested, white suburbs to other areas and groups, such as the mixed-income neighborhoods and ethnic clients in the central city.” Baltimore initially attracted “low-level” chains and “now, upscale, full-service stores wants to locate in areas they had previous ignored.”
Executives’ fears of security costs may be easily abated: Rochester clinched the deal with a Tops supermarket by offering to locate a police station at the development site. And the practice of hiring locals as security guards does a lot to decrease security issues and losses to shrinkage. And, where grocery store development is arduous, programs can help corner stores expand.
Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) technology also offers a means for stores to better track their inventories.
Read more about this topic: Supermarket Shortage
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