Boston-area residents in need of cheap furniture are going to have to continue driving to Stoughton: it was announced today that the long-promised, quasi-mythical (can a retail store be considered vaporware?) Somerville IKEA will not be happening, according to the Boston Globe.
It's been well over a decade since IKEA purchased property between the Assembly Square shopping center and the Mystic River. If I remember correctly, the original proposal had the store opening in 2001. At the time I lived within walking distance and was quite excited at the prospect, but after years of delays I began to wonder if the store would ever be built.
After my first experience visiting an IKEA in Virginia in 1991, I desperately wanted to earn enough money to have my own apartment and furnish it entirely from there. But the longer we waited for the Somerville store, the less its existence came to matter to me. IKEA became less of a novelty, and at the same time I grew up and my tastes changed.
If I do want or need something from IKEA, the Stoughton store is about a 30-minute drive from our house. It's still a useful store for inexpensive household items, and I've had this gigantic aerial photo of the Flatiron Building in New York bookmarked for a couple of years now. (It's almost five feet high by six and a half feet wide.)
When the adjacent mixed-use Assembly Row project started construction earlier this year, along with the future Orange Line stop, and no mention was made of the IKEA project, I suspected the worst. According to the story, IKEA will look to sell the property, and with the other activity already underway on the adjacent sites, I imagine it won't be too difficult.
Showing posts with label Building. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Building. Show all posts
19 July 2012
30 October 2008
Stopping & Shopping
Stop & Shop built a brand new store right next to the existing one where we do most of our food shopping. It opened a couple of weeks ago, so I've had the chance to have a bit of a look around.
At first the idea of plopping a new store next to an existing one seems a bit puzzling. But renovating an existing building is not always the most practical or cost-effective option. New construction allows the existing store to remain open for business without disruption until the new one is ready, and also invites the use of more environmentally friendly building techniques and materials that may not have existed when the older store was being built.
In the case of this particular store, due to the way it was situated on the property there was no way to expand the building's footprint except to come forward into the parking lot, and that would surely have disrupted the store's normal operation. The adjacent strip mall had a large empty store, the former site of an Ames that closed over a decade ago, so the builders simply knocked down that part of the structure, leaving more than enough space for the new store.
Meanwhile, the new supermarket follows the basic template that Stop & Shop has been using for its recent stores. Bakery, deli, and prepared foods are given prominent and more abundant space just inside the entrance. We don't do a lot of cooking, due mostly to laziness, so this arrangement suits us nicely. The asiles of the rest of the store seem a bit wider, and the general newness of things makes trips to the grocery store somewhat more pleasant. And atmosphere definitely affects sales. It seems subjetive, but I believe that people do connect with stores on an emotional level, at least a little bit.
Supermarket chains survive on very thin margins, and if companies don't invest in keeping their stores up to date, shoppers will go elsewhere. Having lived near an undersized, run-down, and generally quite depressing Star on Broadway in Somerville for over a decade, I can attest to this. I avoided this miserable store for exactly these reasons (unless it was an emergency), and always wondered why the company didn't bother to fix up the place. Then Stop & Shop opened a big, shiny Somerville store a short distance away, and that pretty much eliminated any remaining reasons for people to keep going to the ratty old Star; it closed, supposedly for renovations, a couple of years later, but it turned out to be permanent.
I don't know what's going to happen to the old Stop & Shop building now. I suppose it could be subdivided into smaller spaces (which are easier to lease), or maybe it too is going to be razed to make way for something else. This particular strip mall has had its share of ups and downs over the years, and recently there has been a fair bit of other retail development in the area as well, so with that and the sucky economy, it may be a while before anything happens.
At first the idea of plopping a new store next to an existing one seems a bit puzzling. But renovating an existing building is not always the most practical or cost-effective option. New construction allows the existing store to remain open for business without disruption until the new one is ready, and also invites the use of more environmentally friendly building techniques and materials that may not have existed when the older store was being built.
In the case of this particular store, due to the way it was situated on the property there was no way to expand the building's footprint except to come forward into the parking lot, and that would surely have disrupted the store's normal operation. The adjacent strip mall had a large empty store, the former site of an Ames that closed over a decade ago, so the builders simply knocked down that part of the structure, leaving more than enough space for the new store.
Meanwhile, the new supermarket follows the basic template that Stop & Shop has been using for its recent stores. Bakery, deli, and prepared foods are given prominent and more abundant space just inside the entrance. We don't do a lot of cooking, due mostly to laziness, so this arrangement suits us nicely. The asiles of the rest of the store seem a bit wider, and the general newness of things makes trips to the grocery store somewhat more pleasant. And atmosphere definitely affects sales. It seems subjetive, but I believe that people do connect with stores on an emotional level, at least a little bit.
Supermarket chains survive on very thin margins, and if companies don't invest in keeping their stores up to date, shoppers will go elsewhere. Having lived near an undersized, run-down, and generally quite depressing Star on Broadway in Somerville for over a decade, I can attest to this. I avoided this miserable store for exactly these reasons (unless it was an emergency), and always wondered why the company didn't bother to fix up the place. Then Stop & Shop opened a big, shiny Somerville store a short distance away, and that pretty much eliminated any remaining reasons for people to keep going to the ratty old Star; it closed, supposedly for renovations, a couple of years later, but it turned out to be permanent.
I don't know what's going to happen to the old Stop & Shop building now. I suppose it could be subdivided into smaller spaces (which are easier to lease), or maybe it too is going to be razed to make way for something else. This particular strip mall has had its share of ups and downs over the years, and recently there has been a fair bit of other retail development in the area as well, so with that and the sucky economy, it may be a while before anything happens.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
