Melinda Tuhus Photo
On a weekday mid-afternoon, six of the seven check-out lanes at Vermont’s City Market were open, five or six customers deep. Some toted home all-natural granola, others staples like bread and milk.
Will a similar scene come to downtown New Haven?
City Market is a co-op supermarket in the small university city of Burlington. It opened in 2002.
It’s the model for a similar supermarket planned for the ground floor of New Haven’s soon-to-open 360 State apartment tower: Elm City Food Co-op. 360 State’s developer said he hopes the market will open by the end of this year.
I checked out the City Market on a trip last week to Burlington for a glimpse of what downtown New Haveners can expect.
I encountered the busy check-out lines — and it wasn’t peak shopping time, as Christopher Lyon happily pointed out.
Lyon (pictured at the top of this story) is the assistant operations manager at the hybrid food co-op/supermarket, the city’s only substantial food outlet.
City Market has many of the attractions of its parent, the old Onion River Co-op, like beans and grains and granola in bulk, and lots of high quality produce, including organic. But it’s also a full-service supermarket, and it dedicates significant floor space to all kinds of prepared foods, including an impressive salad bar, an entrée bar, a deli, and shelves of sandwiches in plastic clamshells, with 95 percent of all items prepared on-site.
“We just added a third shift” to help with all that work, Lyon said. “We’re making food 24 hours a day.”
Burlington’s market, like New Haven’s planned downtown market, is a “hybrid coop.” That means that anyone can shop there, without being a member. But membership has its benefits. Those who sweep the floors, stock the shelves or water the plantings for two hours a month get a 7 percent discount on all purchases. For anyone who can swing four hours a month, it’s a 12 percent discount. With no work commitment, people who sign up as members will still be eligible for a “patronage refund” of a percentage of what they spent during the year. Last year it averaged $105.
“To be able to get a check back from your grocery store at the end of the year is a nice little bonus,” Lyon said.
The retail space measures 16,000 square feet, half or less the size of major supermarkets. (The planned 360 State retail space is about 12,000 square feet.) “But we are performing much higher on sales per square foot,” Lyon said. The market has 7,000 members – not bad for a city of 35,000 people. He said over the past few years, more people have joined. Members used to make up just 20 percent of shoppers. Now it’s closer to 40 percent.
One common complaint is that City Market is pricier than the supermarkets nearby, outside the city limits. Two friends of this reporter who live in Burlington, both solidly middle class, said they don’t shop there because they’re able to get to other markets where they feel their dollars stretch further.
Lyon called it a “myth” that City Market is more expensive than its competitors. “We don’t do high-low [loss leader] pricing,” where certain items are sold below cost to get shoppers in the door. “What we do is price food across the board without any gimmicks; we pass on the true cost of food, with a margin we need to meet to keep the doors open and pay our employees and all of that. We continually perform better than at least two of the three competitors that are conventional.” He added that the market especially keeps prices as low as possible for basics like bread and milk.
Another friend who joined the co-op in the old days and has been a two-hours-a-month, four-hours-a-month, and no-hours-a-month member over the years called it “goofy” that my other friends hadn’t joined. (She now gets a senior 7 percent discount without working any hours.) She raved about the quality of the food, including organic offerings, and said she finds it convenient to buy some low-cost staples there as well. She also appreciates some of the community-friendly hold-over ambiance from the co-op’s early days.
My experience was a positive one. A friend I got a fresh, delicious salad and dollops of half a dozen items from the hot buffet for lunch – all delicious. Prices were not rock bottom but were in line with other places with similar offerings. Later, I bought an organic banana (at 99 cents a pound), a small bag of extremely fresh roasted peanuts ($3.39 a pound) and a pack of two AA batteries for $2.39. All were in line with what I pay at Stop&Shop.
Lyon has been involved with the New Haven project. “The number one thing I can say about supporting co-ops is you are automatically supporting your community,” he said. “If they go in and shop at some of the larger chain stores, the money’s going out of state or at least out of the city they’re in. [Supermarkets] work from backwards models: they go from profit to the food they carry, food being the last concern. For co-ops it’s starting with the food and the quality, figuring out the true cost, and then supporting the community through providing all the services they can to get that food to them. It’s based on the food first, and the people that consume it, rather than from the other way around, looking at it as a profit center.”
About the Elm City’s forthcoming market, Lyon said, “New Haven has a lot to gain from reinvesting in the downtown community. More development is happening downtown. It’s a great walking and biking community, so that’s a natural tie-in, and I can’t see why it wouldn’t do wonderful.”
"Lyon has been involved with the New Haven project. "The number one thing I can say about supporting co-ops is you are automatically supporting your community," he said. "If they go in and shop at some of the larger chain stores, the money's going out of state or at least out of the city they're in."
Folks at the Greater Dwight Development Corporation - perhaps this is a model to explore for the Shaw's property, too? Perhaps this is the model that should have been done there originally?