They're in the final planning & permit grabbing stages of bringing the areas first marketplace store, which will be located 13 miles from my current work place, supposedly with a late 2016/early 2017 grand open goal. The store I'm in now is small, relative. We do a little over 500 a week, and all marketplaces I've seen do at minimum 1M+. This marketplace is taking the place of another store that is doing good volume(750+), but small on space. My question is this. How much do you think it'll drop our sales out here? We've been due for expansions for a while, and my fear is that with that coming in, our business will drop and won't get it and hours will start getting cut for the part timers. Customers always complain how we don't have what they want and they have to travel to stores 15 miles away to get it, simply due to our size(35k sq. ft). Also, I'm wondering if they are going to just use the people who are already working in store that they are replacing at the new location, or if they will be changing that up as well. Management and all.
All in all, I'm very curious how the marketplace is going to look. Pretty excited to check it out when it does come. It's simultaneously going up with 2 others to mark the areas first move into them. Locally we had a bit of a monopoly, but a couple high end grocers are coming in 2016/2017 to compete(Trader Joe's, Sprouts which is grand opening in 2 weeks) with multiple locations. They'll have to spend some money getting all the stores up to snuff if they want to.
Your sales will probably most suffer too much. If it were being built close, maybe, but not 13 miles away. I work at one. We have 4 other krogers within 13 miles and they're doing fine. Depending on the time lines for the old and new stores, they'll probably just move the old employees over, but they'll definitely have to hire additional staff.
The thing is, these stores are away from the city, so 13 miles isn't much as that's the closest store to us. In a big city 13 miles is a lot, but out here, I feel like it'd be a lot more impactful. Hopefully I'm wrong though.
In my town, the closest stores are 25+ miles apart, so to me, a store 13 miles away would scare me. I'd be worried about sales to be honest, but i don't know how the pattern for smaller towns are.
