Say goodbye to SaveRite, folks; Winn-Dixie, SaveRite’s owner, is shutting down all its SaveRite stores in the Atlanta area. This includes, presumably, the one in Conyers where I get sent every time we’re over at my boyfriend’s parents’ house and his brother runs out of butter for cooking. I’m going to miss that SaveRite.
I get the impression that the Atlanta supermarkets are going through a period of confusion right now, anyway. From my experience — and please chime in if yours is different — Publix is more consistent in its look and feel; Kroger is more likely to run the gamut. Kroger can be fairly utilitarian and unhappy-looking (see: the one on Ponce, in the shopping center with Camelli’s Pizza and Chin Chin II), but the two competing Krogers on Peachtree near the Brookhaven MARTA have both improved by leaps and bounds in the last couple months. Did you know you can now buy Veggie Wash and Seventh Generation products at Kroger? I didn’t either, and when I saw the Seventh Generation display I think I stared at it open-mouthed for half a minute. (They also beat Whole Paycheck on price, I believe, if you’re wondering.)
With supermarkets, I suspect, there are two directions you can go. One route is to try to compete for the disposable income of the upper-middle class. Market One, at the corner of Ponce and North Highland, tried to do this, and was in absolutely the wrong location for it: someplace not two minutes’ drive from a Whole Foods or Sevananda might have worked better. Publix, I believe, is trying to position itself just below Whole Foods: people who are willing to pay for higher-quality food, in-store wine tastings, and (depending on your Publix) happier cashiers, but don’t particularly care to go out of their way to make sure the slaughtered chickens keep their beak on until the bitter end.
The other route is to appeal to lower-middle-class customers, which is what SaveRite was trying to do. But then you’re going to run into the 3000-pound behemoth that is Wal-Mart. I don’t know if any chain would be daring enough to try and take SaveRite’s place, or if Kroger’s going to try and extend itself far enough to present one face to wealthy Brookhaven consumers and another to people desperately needing cigarettes on Ponce at 3 a.m. Another possibility is that lower-middle-class customers will be served by a series of smaller chains that can make up in customization what they lack in bulk discounts — Atlanta Farmer’s Market on Buford Highway, for example, where meat is relatively cheap (milk is not) and there’s half an aisle devoted entirely to varieties of soy sauce.
What someone ought to figure out, though, is what to do with the buildings SaveRite leaves behind. It’s amazing, and not in a good way, that the same shopping center that happily hosts a Bruester’s, a Mellow Mushroom, the Highlander, and Midtown Art Cinema has had (or had? is that space filled yet?) such a hard time putting something in where the SaveRite used to be. People worry about what might happen if a behemoth Wal-Mart takes its ball and goes elsewhere, and rightly so. But the problem is going to hit the former SaveRite spaces too, and unless, say, the Container Store goes on a massive expansion binge, I don’t know what the solution will be.