• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Giant Offers Taste of Future at Camp Hill Supermarket

Posted on: Sunday, 9 October 2005, 15:00 CDT

By Tom Dochat, The Patriot-News, Harrisburg, Pa.

Oct. 9--Executives at Giant Food Stores LLC are looking at the company's new supermarket in Camp Hill as one big laboratory, with plenty of expanded services and merchandise for shoppers.

They're not expecting the laboratory experiments to fail.

"We've been wanting to do this for a little while," said Tony Schiano, president and CEO of Carlisle-based Giant. The key was to find a location that "would give us the size we wanted, but was close enough to home so we could watch it, monitor it and use it as a laboratory for trying a lot of things."

Giant will be trying many ideas at the 91,000-square-foot store, which opens at noon Wednesday in the Camp Hill Shopping Center. The supermarket is about 30 percent larger than the typical Giant, and more than double the size of the store it replaces.

The supermarket will offer child-care services for customers, cooking classes, a chef to prepare home-style meals, an expanded health and organic section, a kitchen shop with demonstrations, a drive-through pharmacy, a grocery valet, two nutrition consultants and community rooms to handle health, exercise and weight-loss classes.

Schiano said Giant's goal is to provide the "best of everything we can think of in terms of solving customer needs and meeting their needs for food, nutrition, health-related issues, lifestyle issues.

"We think it's going to offer the consumer everything they need and more in a supermarket. And it's going to be in a very shop-able, easy to negotiate and navigate, while at the same time fun environment."

If the store is successful, "we'll try to put more of them exactly as they are in large markets," Schiano said. Where that may not be possible, Giant will "take the elements that are successful here and basically plug and play them into other stores," he said.

Schiano said Giant, which has the largest share of the grocery market in the Harrisburg area, should know "relatively quickly" how the Camp Hill store is performing.

"We're talking months here," he said. "Not that we're expecting anything not to work, but whenever you do these things, some things get better reception that others."

Jeff Metzger, publisher of Food Trade News, said the store should do well. Giant has picked the "red bull's-eye" for the store based on demographics, Giant's existing market share and the success of the current store, he said.

Metzger said the existing, smaller Camp Hill store has weekly sales of about $600,000. The larger store, he said, will have the potential for $1 million in weekly sales.

"I would expect the store to be profitable and very successful," he said.

If the concept works, Giant will probably expand the prototype farther east to the Philadelphia area, where Giant's growth "has been very good over the past five years," Metzger said.

Giant operates 121 supermarkets under the Giant and Martin's banners in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia. It has 146 Tops stores in northeastern Ohio and upstate New York.

Metzger said Giant tested some of the features in the new Camp Hill store at two supermarkets of similar size in the Tops territory -- one in the Buffalo, N.Y., suburbs and the other in the Rochester, N.Y., area. Those stores, he said, have "lots more variety, more natural, organic and specialty items. Expanded produce."

Schiano said Giant tested expanded healthful and organic products at both stores, and the cooking school and child-care center at the Buffalo location. He said the two stores, which were remodels, are "doing very well. We're very pleased with the results."

Metzger was less effusive about their performance. He said the Buffalo-area store is doing "OK," while performance at the Rochester store has been better.

Schiano said Giant has been thinking about a store like the one in Camp Hill for more than three years. "Once the space became available, we started to focus heavily on it about 18 months ago," he said.

Schiano hopes each shopper's first reaction to the store will be "Wow!"

"We think it's a store that is more than competitive with any operator we've seen in the United States," Schiano said. "We feel really good about it. I don't say that in an arrogant way because we respect all of our competition."

Giant has been the dominant supermarket chain in the Harrisburg area for years. It has about a third of the market share in Cumberland and Dauphin counties and continues to build stores and remodel others throughout the region.

Schiano said the average age of Giant stores is less than five years.

"That's a commitment we have, to keep our stores in the best shape possible, to continue to upgrade them, add new features as consumers demand them," he said.

Giant will be opening a 65,000-square-foot supermarket along Route 39 north of Hershey in early to mid-November, spokesman Dennis N. Hopkins said.

According to Schiano, that store will have some of the same features as the Camp Hill supermarket, including more organic products and portable scanners that Giant calls EasyShop.

Schiano said the South Hanover Twp. store is in an area that is growing about 5 percent a year.

"That's big growth for almost anywhere," he said. "We think that's a location that's going to do well now, but it's going to do even better as that whole area develops and fills in."

Giant has reserved some land in Hampden Twp. for a Camp Hill-sized supermarket that would either replace its Enola store, or be an addition to the portfolio. Schiano said the Enola store is "pushing at the walls much earlier than we thought it was going to."

The new Camp Hill store is the third one in the borough. The first store opened on Market Street in 1969. Giant moved to the former Camp Hill Shopping Mall in 1996.

The existing store will be demolished 30 days after the new one opens. LA Fitness is expected to open on the former Giant site in the third quarter of 2006.

Leo Ullman, CEO of Cedar Shopping Centers Inc., owner of the Camp Hill Shopping Center, said he expects the new Giant to be a major draw for the center, which has been converted from a mall.

"I'm very thrilled by it," he said. "It looks spectacular. I think it will attract a large number of shoppers."

Giant has been an essential partner with Cedar Shopping Centers for its properties in the Harrisburg area. Cedar also owns The Point shopping center in Lower Paxton Twp., a complex that revived when Giant decided to open a store there.

Cedar owns the Giant-anchored shopping centers in Fairview Twp., Newport and Halifax, and is the developer of the South Hanover Twp. commercial property where Giant will open its store next month.

The relationship has been "terrific for us because Giant is such a strong and excellent retailer," Ullman said.

Schiano said the Camp Hill store is "all about solutions" for customers. "The concept here is you can come in and use the store in its entirety or pieces and parts."

One of the pieces could be portable scanners, called EasyShop. Customers can use the devices to scan their merchandise and then bag their items as they shop. When they are finished, shoppers can go to an EasyShop checkout aisle -- three of them in the Camp Hill store -- to pay for their merchandise that is priced, bagged and ready to go.

"We're finding the technology thing is cutting across all demographics," Schiano said.

Community rooms in the Camp Hill store are designed to serve a variety of groups. Schiano said the company has partnered with PinnacleHealth, Motion Motivation and Weight Watchers for various health and wellness programs, from pre-natal care to Pilates and toddler exercises.

Schiano said the rooms are available to any civic organization for a "very nominal charge."

-----

To see more of The Patriot-News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.patriot-news.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Patriot-News, Harrisburg, Pa.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

AHO, AHLN,

Source: The Patriot-News

More News in this Category