Quote:
Originally Posted by flar
Downtown Hamilton has over 60,000 residents easily. The problem from the perspective of grocery and other stores is that a lot of them aren't big spenders.
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What abour downtown workers? This is what the Tesco Metro brand is all about in the UK - serving these folk with (relatively higher-margin, faster-moving) convenience stuff for at-work lunches and things to take home for a quick dinner... plus a pared-down line of products across the board, actually not to different to variety stores but with familiar branding.
Of course, retail culture here might be quite different. Although I'm sure I recall Tesco entering the US market in the last couple of years. Can't remember details, but it was totally new branding, not sure if they were going to follow the same biz model of out of town stores AND urban downtown convenience locations.
Even so, lots of brownfield sites downtown, a canny retailer could put a larger size store in one of those (maybe even parking if the site's already got it?) - I'm not convinced this is something that'll happen in the immediate term, but I could see this happening in the future.