All of our bigger stores are out on one route, separated from residential areas. The only specific business that has two sites out there is one of the grocery stores. One building is more down-to-earth everyday groceries, and the other has most of those but more of a selection of snooty foods.
In Baltimore Co. there are two Home Depot stores about two miles apart (Whitemarsh and Golden Ring for MD dopers).
Okay, people. I think we’ve documented the phenomenon sufficiently well. Now, can anyone explain how they find enough business to support both stores? as elmwood wrote,
Back when I lived in NYC, there were five supermarkets within a few blocks of my apartment. But they weren’t the same company, and each was best for a different type of food (one had the best produce, one had the best meat, etc.). This makes sense in a place like New York, where most people don’t drive and can buy only as much as they can carry. So you go shopping about every other day, to a different store each time.
They’re selling coffee for $4.00 a cup. It can’t cost them more than 5 cents to make a cup of coffee. If they sell 250 cups of coffee on the first day of the month, they’ve made enough profit to cover their $1000 rent for their 300 sq. ft. store for the entire month. The rest of that week covers a months salary for all of the employees. Then they have 3 weeks of profit.
Starbucks aside, I know of a few spots in the New Orleans area where there are open Shell gas stations across the street from each other. When Shell bought Texaco that happened as the Texaco stores got Shell signs. A few have stayed open just because they’re at big intersections and it’s hard to get across the intersection to get gas.
Just curious, I wonder – do they have the same prices?
(PS: That makes sense, as does panache45’s supermarket comments. Thanks.)
There are two Tom Thumbs about half a mile apart in Dallas–one at Preston and Royal and one at Preston and Forest, if anyone knows the area. I think there are a couple reasons this makes sense–first, the one at Preston and Royal is an old grocery store in a veryt established neighborhood. I doubt it’s always been a Tom Thumb, but that neighborhood has been shopping there for an awfully long time. However, it’s a way overbuilt corner with no room to expand, and that fits what has been said in this thread–when you have more demand but no more room, better to open a second store than to let a competitor do it. So they built a second store less than a mile up the road. Second, they made the second store a kosher market, potentially grabbing some market share there, too.
Yes, the ones that are at the same intersection have always had the same prices (from my observance). I know in one situation where there was a Shell and a Texaco, they were both privately owned stations and the guy who owned the Shell bought the Texaco and made it a Shell. I guess he didn’t want someone to buy it and put up a No-Name station there and undercut his prices.
In Granada Hills - northern suburb in the city of LA, there are two Ralph’s grocery stores, right across the street from each other. Each one is in a shopping center with numerous other stores.
Chatsworth St. & Zelzah Ave.
Here in Roanoke, there are two mega-Krogers* on the same road (Brambleton Ave, or Rte 221) that, according to my trip odometer, are 0.5 miles apart. Shortly after the second one opened, the original – which was a standard-size Kroger at one end of a strip mall – closed; I figured this was done because it was redundant to keep it there.
Nope…as soon as it closed its doors, construction began on a new mega-Kroger on the opposite end of that same strip mall (the end, interestingly enough, closer to the new Kroger just down the street).
Both mega-Krogers have been open for a couple of years now, and neither is showing any signs of going anywhere. The mind boggles.
*My own term; Kroger doesn’t differentiate between its regular and plus-sized locations (think Wal-Mart vs. Super Wal-Mart), so I have to do it for them.
In our case, everyone for miles around has to some to that route so in terms of total buyers there are enough. Plus, in the specific stores I mentioned, the product line and atmosphere are different enough to attract different populations.
Actually, I always see those Future Shops labelled as “Future Shop by Circuit City” – which makes me wonder why they just don’t have Circuit City anywhere.
As a murkin, what I’d really like to see is a CompUSA, but I don’t imagine that’d fly very well at that location, and CompCanada doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Hey, what’s the deal with that Tucker’s Marketplace that’s there? It looked like a really nice restaurant from the outside, but as soon as the hostess identified us as newbies and told us it was a buffet, we walked out. (Getting tired of the same old places; we’ve lived in a hotel here since May!)
That does seem to be an irrefutable representation of retail redundancy, but, begging the indilgence of the OP for one moment, might I ask you to answer me this: Why is it that we can buy Kroger-brand products at just about any grocery store here in Arizona, like say yogurt, f’rinstance, but not only are there no occurrences of two Krogers within a block of each other, the nearest single Kroger store, Mega or Mini, is 1,000 miles away in San Antonio, TX? How come you get two one one street in Rodyoak and we in the Copper State get ugatz? 
I wonder if such clustering of retailers is really considered an economic drawback to be overcome by the retailers’ manegement.
Summary of a recent short New Scientist article on the subject
I suppose that makes sense - e.g. my mental map of the city where I live has some areas marked “shoe stores”, “book stores”, “mobile phone stores”, “opticians”. When I last got a new prescription of glasses (the previous ones were by an optician in another town), I went to the street I associated with “opticians” (there are three of them there), and went into one of those stores.
Also anecdotically: There was a debate in our city some years ago on relocating the municipal bus hub and developing the area for a department store or large clothes retailer. There is a large clothes store across the street from there (the only really large clothes store in town), and the management of that store went on record as advocating a competing large clothes retailer across the street from them. They said a choice between two large clothing stores would draw more clothes shoppers into town, and they expected to get more business as one of two competing stores than they got as the single store of its kind. (The development did not go ahead, so I cannot say if that would have panned out)
That’s probably exactly what it is. There’s a Starbuck’s a block away from one of the offices I work in. I love Starbuck’s coffee. But I have never decided to walk that extra block and cross Eighth Avenue instead of picking up coffee on my way from the subway to the office.
The Kroger Co. operates under many name brands, in AZ, it’s mostly Fry’s food and drug and Fry’s Marketplace (the Mega version). They’re everywhere.
I haven’t noticed any Kroger products in non-Kroger chains, but I do most of my shopping in Fry’s, so I probably wouldn’t.
Thanks, Sonoran Lizard King of Glendale, AZ. If you know Payson at all, there’s one major intersection in town where State Highway 87 (N/S) intersects with State Highway 260 (E/W), right in the exact geographic center of the state. In roughly three of the four quadrants are a Safeway, a Basha’s and a Super Wal-Mart, all of which carry Kroger’s yogurt in four different varieties - no fat, light, regular, and thick & creamy. You can also find Yoplait, which for some reason comes in that stupid upside-down container that’s impossible to empty completely; Dannon’s, although they are harder to find since their corporate ties to France caused a bit of a boycott around here for a while; and TCBY of the frozen type, which almost doesn’t count as a real yogurt. Y’know, now that I think of it, there’s a brand new Walgreen’s in the fourth quadrant that, FAIK, might carry yogurt, too. Next time I’m in town, I’ll check it out… they might even carry a new and different brand. Hmmm… maybe I should start a new thread all about yogurt.
It is strange that this thread came up because I was just thinking about the very thing. Walgreen’s is on quite a building spree and standalone stores are springing up all over the place. The density seemed pretty high, but they are building a brand new store at a corner in west Denver. 0.69 miles away, there is another store. I find it a bit difficult to believe that the old store will be closed in favor of the new one, but maybe. The new one IS a 24 hour store and the old one isn’t.
Bob
Do you know if either of them sells yogurt?
Near my house there are two Ralphs stores that are literally across the street from one another. It came about because several years back, as Kroger was consolidating, they ended purchasing two competing chains, and one of the stores was a Ralphs and the other a Hughes.
Now I don’t know if they kept both stores open because of lease obligations, but my gut feeling is that it’s to keep another chain from moving in (it’s a pretty prime location in an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood with no other grocery stores in at least a 3/4 mile radius).
To this day, several years after those acquisitions, both stores continue operating, across the street from one another…