That’s what we were told last week over coffee with Travis “Buck” Kingman III when he stopped by our office to get more details on the coming Whole Foods Market.
First, he asked us if it was true that Pagosa Source Real Estate Advisors had sold the old downtown City Market building to a company with financial ties to Whole Foods. He said he was in the Bear Creek Saloon and the bartender and two of the waitresses confirmed the story. He went down the road to the Pagosa Bar and was told the same thing by Cletus Ledbetter, a 4th generation local. He was wondering why we hadn’t told him anything about it when we had seen him earlier in the month having dinner at the Alley House Grill.
I told Buck we have known the new owner of the old City Market Building for 20+ years and we were unaware of any ties to Whole Foods or any other grocery chain. I explained that another privately owned chain, headquartered in Texas did come and look at the building with several of their top executives earlier in the fall. They flew into Pagosa in two private jets, spent about five hours looking at the building and town and then returned to Texas. They informed us about a week later that they were not going to pursue things further at this time. I suggested to Buck that might have been how the rumor of Whole Foods got started, considering they are also headquartered in Texas.
Travis “Buck” Kingman III
Buck did get us thinking and according to Walter Robb, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Whole Foods, the chain will not be opening a store here in Pagosa Springs, at least not in the near future and the company is not connected with the Purchaser of the building.
It would certainly be a plus for the area if they were going to locate a store here. Whole Foods has grown considerably since opening the first Whole Foods Market in Austin, Texas in 1980. Today the company has 340 stores in North American and the United Kingdom. Whole Foods’ experience entering the grocery business in the United Kingdom has been much more successful than Britain’s Tesco PLC’s attempt with their Fresh and Easy grocery store brand. The giant British grocery chain opened 200 stores in California, Arizona and Nevada. After five years they threw in the towel, to the tune of $1.8 billion in losses. While we had a home in Phoenix, my wife Lauri liked to shop at Fresh an Easy but I never cared for the store layout or all the packaged fresh food products.
Whole Foods has much more accurately gauged, adapted and, to some extent directed, the changing preferences of the supermarket consumer. They maintain very good margins, prompting some of my friends to rename the chain “Whole Wallet”. They have done a great job of targeting a very specific grocery customer profile where Fresh and Easy seemed to have missed all the signals and trends.
So far, even Durango does not have the requirements Whole Foods looks for when considering a community to locate a new store within. The first hurdle is the population base. Whole Foods looks for 200,000 or more people living within a 20 minute drive of its location. Pagosa Springs certainly can’t reach that threshold and even with Durango and Farmington, we don’t have the population needed to get there. Pagosa Springs, Durango and Farmington do meet most of the other requirements. There are 25,000 square foot and larger facilities available in our market areas. We have a large number of college educated residents. Our communities have store locations available with good access to roadways next to lighted intersections with excellent visibility. We also have store facilities available in high traffic areas for foot and/or vehicle traffic, another Whole Foods requirement. The CDOT traffic count in front of the old City Market is quite high. But, all for nothing without the critical population base Whole Foods requires.
It seems Whole Foods knows what works for their business model and they plan to stick with it. Had Tesco followed a sound business plan with their Fresh and Easy stores they might have spared their owners the $1.8 billion misadventure.
We were sorry we were unable to confirm the rumors that Buck had shared with us. (If Pagosa had been able to reach the population growth PAWS had projected in obtaining loan funding for the land acquisition of the proposed Dry Gulch Reservoir Project, we could probably support two Whole Foods Markets!)
