FORT WAYNE – Shoppers in this Columbus suburb can find fried chicken, diamond earrings and leather sofas under one roof.
The concept isn’t new – just ask Walmart and Meijer customers. But the name on the door is: Kroger.
Kroger Co. is rolling out its marketplace format in two Fort Wayne locations in coming months: Scott’s Food & Pharmacy at 5725 Coventry Lane and Kroger at 601 E. Dupont Road. The company hasn’t announced when work will begin or other details, but it has said the Village at Coventry Scott’s will be demolished and rebuilt.
The new stores will combine perishable food and general merchandise in about 120,000 square feet, or twice the size of a traditional Kroger.
Three Kroger media liaisons gave The Journal Gazette a tour of one of Dublin’s marketplace stores last month. The 3 1/2 -year-old store replaced a traditional store that was on the other side of a busy street. The construction project took about nine months from groundbreaking to door opening, a spokeswoman said.
At the end of October, just 85 – or about 3 percent – of Kroger’s stores were marketplace stores.
The differences between the traditional format and the larger marketplace version seem subtle – at first. But a trip through the seemingly endless aisles turned up lots of items that aren’t typically found in a Kroger.
Just 15 feet from a cooler filled with plastic milk jugs sat a brown leather sofa and love seat arranged on a coordinating area rug and flanked by a wooden coffee table, end table and lamp. The juxtaposition was jarring.
The Cincinnati-based grocery chain entered the general merchandise market in 1999 when it acquired the Fred Meyer stores in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Company leaders have cautiously integrated the two business models over the years.
“Kroger decided to find the best of the best of what they sold and bring them into our stores,” spokeswoman Lacey Gottstein said.
Unlike local Meijer and Walmart stores, Kroger’s marketplace stores don’t sell clothing, automotive products or full entertainment lines. They stock linens, furniture, jewelry and toys.
Frank Guglielmi, Meijer spokesman, doesn’t comment on competitors’ strategies. Even so, he indicated the company isn’t afraid of a fight.
“We successfully compete with a variety of national retailers on a daily basis throughout the Midwest,” he said.
Kroger’s goal is for each of its 18 divisions to have eight to 10 marketplace stores, said Gottstein, a marketplace sales promoter in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus was the first market in its division to get the larger format.
Kroger Central Division executives decided the Fort Wayne community is the best place to debut the larger-store concept even though that Indianapolis is their largest market. The Indianapolis-based Central Division has 154 stores, mostly in Indiana. The division is the company’s fifth-largest.
Within the Fort Wayne area, Kroger chose the two marketplace locations based on sales and surveys. Demographics, including income levels, also played a role.
Each division needs a critical mass of marketplace stores to justify ordering, warehousing and shipping the merchandise that’s not found in most Kroger-operated stores, said spokesman John Elliott, who is based in Indianapolis.
Some stores in the Fort Wayne market already have one or two expanded departments like those found in a marketplace store. The Kroger on U.S. 24, across from the Coventry Scott’s, stocks an expanded selection of pots, pans, dishes and glassware. Sales in those stores also add to the critical mass Elliott referred to.
In marketplace stores, complementary merchandise is displayed together. In the bakery, for example, triangular pie servers and ceramic pie savers share shelf space with apple and cherry pies. Some stores place vacuums directly beside bottled cleaning products.
“We do try to integrate it where possible and when it makes sense,” Gottstein said. Employees are “trying to plant that seed to encourage additional sales” by showing which items work together.
The company’s display experts arrange furniture with coordinating rugs, lamps and other accessories into layouts that mimic how someone might outfit a family room or kitchen.
“We have lots of customers who say, ‘I want that,’ ” Gottstein said, gesturing to one of the living room “scenes.”
Managing a marketplace-sized store is demanding, said Michael Foster, assistant manager of the Dublin store.
“The physical size of the store is a challenge in itself,” he said of the store that averages 27,000 customers a week.
The store, which stocks about 40,000 different items, is a destination for curious shoppers from surrounding areas, he said. Every day Foster talks to customers who tell him it’s their first visit.
Keeping the store stocked is another challenge. Grocery deliveries arrive frequently, but furniture and other home items take five days to arrive from Oregon, Foster said. Managers have to keep a close watch on inventory levels so they don’t have empty shelves while they wait for the next truck. Empty shelves mean potential lost sales.
Among the Dublin store’s features are a sushi section with a chef making fresh items, an expanded cheese section with a cheese steward, a pizzeria that makes baked and unbaked pies, a Starbucks coffee shop, expanded wine and magazine selections, toys and a Fred Meyer jewelry store.
Kroger officials haven’t revealed what departments the Fort Wayne stores will have.
