Thursday, September 02, 2010
Kroger plan includes 4 other retailers
The grocer plans to build store space near its Rutgers Street location.
The latest from The Ticker blog
Kroger wants to transform an area near its Roanoke store on Rutgers Street into a shopping hub, and in the process lure more customers to its supermarket.
The grocer is making plans to construct a 7,150-square-foot structure to house four retailers to the right side of its store at 5050 Rutgers St. N.W., near Towne Square Shopping Center.
Kroger filed plans for the project this week with the city's planning department. The plans have not yet been approved.
Kroger has not named the four retailers that will occupy the proposed building, said Carl York, a spokesman for the grocer's mid-Atlantic region, based in Roanoke.
But the supermarket chain probably will choose businesses that appeal to its primary shopper base of middle-class families with children, which are mostly female shoppers, said Jim Hertel, managing partner at Willard Bishop, an Illinois retail consulting firm.
Potential retailers include shoe stores, gift shops, book stores and service businesses, he said.
Still, at most centers, "Kroger's likely to be the bigger traffic driver" in frequency, Hertel said. A typical grocery store has 15,000 transactions a week, depending on its location, he said.
The new retail building should be complete by fall 2011, York said, and it joins a Kroger fuel center on the same site as the 54,153-square-foot supermarket.
Other changes are in store for the Rutgers Street Kroger's pharmacy customers.
A drive-through pharmacy window, now attached to the side of Kroger, will relocate permanently to a remote kiosk in a front parking area at the store, according to site plans. There, customers will drive up to the kiosk, and pharmacy transactions will be made through an underground chute system that sends a tube back and forth to customers' vehicles and the in-store pharmacy, similar to a bank drive-through.
The pharmacy kiosk design is one of few at Kroger stores nationwide and the first for the mid-Atlantic region, York said.
