The Englewood Whole Foods has just announced closure 6-years after opening. First 150 employees
became 50!! Supply chain management professional Thom Alcazar of EATS Groceries, LLC, foretold that
standard
supermarket concepts will fail. In Black communities, standard supermarkets will fail most quickly.
Online shopping with delivery was expected to grab ever increasing market share each year and, it
has. Demographics with the least computer knowledge and familiarity will shrink supermarket margins
from less than 2% to a loss of 1-5% each day. Low-income communities became “food deserts” as the
first to lose supermarkets that formerly had been neighborhood business and job anchors.
Standard supermarket concepts last longer in wealthy communities where price is not as important,
online retail/delivery is not a cost or risk factor and “ready to eat” is not prohibited by
SNAP/LINK (food stamps). Bob Mariano’s of “DOMS”, formerly of the Mariano’s chain, and former
President of the Dominick’s chain, predicted early last year that the old supermarket standard was
obsolete when opening his first of two new concept stores in higher-end communities. The South Shore
Dominick's supermarket found it was cheaper to close two-years before the lease ran out than to lose
up to 5% per day on $375,000 weekly revenue.
...
EATS Groceries, LLC is the only grocery concept that anticipated and designed a development to
addresses specific “food desert” realities. While being a social enterprise, it is a for-profit
sustainable entity with backing from a WinTrust community bank and endorsement from universities,
parishes, State Senators and Representatives as well as a U.S. representative. Most importantly, the
local Alderman Jason Ervin committed at his Austin community ward meeting that he would bring EATS
Groceries to his Austin neighborhood. EATS can attempt to make the closed Aldi and startup 40 Acres
grocers more likely to be sustainable by being their local warehouse vendor. The Aldi was purchased
by the city for $700,000 and the 40 Acres store is opening with a donated space and $2.5 million
from the city. 40 Acres is expected to add 4 staff and the city hopes to find a tenant for the
purchased Aldi.
Chicago Black communities first lost supermarkets (greater than 20,000 items) and recently began losing “specialty stores” (less than 2,000 items) to create more “food deserts”. The specialty stores, Aldi’s and Sav-a-Lot, closed in Austin, Maywood, W Garfield and N Lawndale, primarily Black neighborhoods.
The City of Chicago made well-meaning funding contributions for standard supermarkets where previous failures seemed to validate predictions of unsustainability. First Mariano’s in Bronzeville, then Whole Foods in Englewood were each provided over $10 million each to open in Black communities as standard supermarkets. Subsequently Mariano’s chain was sold to Kroger and Whole Foods was sold to Amazon. Jewel in Woodlawn, after receiving an $11 million TIF sold out to the University of Chicago at a loss soon after opening the new store.A clean bus bearing the EATS logo roams the streets of North Lawndale, picking up shoppers and ferrying them to a kind of supermarket the neighborhood has never seen, that no Chicago neighborhood has ever seen.
The shoppers step off the bus and into a friendly, bright store. No bulletproof glass, no conspicuous surveillance cameras, no burglar bars, none of the familiar paraphernalia that in other stores makes shoppers feel like thieves.
Everything about this store is different. Instead of aisles of groceries, the shoppers are greeted by touch-screen kiosks and cheerful shopping assistants who show them how to order with their fingers.
You want bananas? Touch here. Green or ripe? Touch here.
Many of the shoppers — single mothers, grandmothers — come with kids, and while the adults work the kiosk, the kids are escorted to the kid zone to play and eat healthy treats.
Meanwhile, in the back, the cold, giant warehouse is bustling. Workers, many of them ex-felons who before this store arrived couldn’t find a job, line up along a conveyor belt, loading the orders into grocery totes. They’re all wearing gloves, ensuring that the fruits and vegetables, unlike most supermarket produce, haven’t been squeezed and poked countless times by whoknowswho with Godknowswhat on their hands.
Friends and business partners Thom Alcazar and Walter Kindred hope to transform a lot near Madison and Cicero in Austin into a 38,000 square-foot store and food distribution center. They tell WGN-TV how they plan to do it.
Alcazar, the founder of Alcazar, Ltd., a consulting firm that provides expert knowledge in business automation, believes that he has a blockbuster idea on his hands and wants to deliver it to economically distressed communities like Chicago’s North Lawndale and Austin, and suburbs like Maywood.
It’s called EATS Groceries, and if Alcazar and his team have their way, the store could be housed in the old Maywood Market building at the corner of 5th Ave. and Washington Blvd. within roughly a year’s time after securing a deal.
On the surface, it’s an innovative concept that’s smoothly articulated in a neat, roughly 2-minute video on the EATS website.
“Shopping has become a chore,” the baritone-voiced narrator says. “Long aisles, long lines and screechy carts to push. Eats provides a safe and convenient concierge-type shopping experience, as well as transportation along major routes to our locations.”
Trained assistants, the voice-over notes, will guide shoppers to digital kiosks, where customers would place orders and receive assistance in other matters. Cooking demo kiosks will provide 30-minute tastings of “low-cost, healthy meal samples.”