Why supermarkets keep flocking to rich Charlotte and avoid everyone else
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The sign promising that Three Sisters Market is "coming soon" has been up for years, and it shows. Photo: Alexandria Sands/Axios
South Charlotte is getting yet another grocery store as Wegmans prepares to open an upscale shopping experience, with a sushi bar, expansive cheese selection and a sprawling parking lot for hundreds of cars.
- In west Charlotte, volunteers have spent years seeking funding for food co-ops, so residents won't have to haul grocery bags down narrow sidewalks as far.
Why it matters: Charlotte has become a city where grocers compete to capture affluent areas while other communities struggle to replace a single supermarket that shuttered decades ago.
Follow the money: Grocers "go where the money is," Phil Lempert, the "supermarket guru," tells Axios.
- Wegmans, in particular, looks at education and income demographics, population growth, and areas "with high food interest."
- The New York retailer chose Ballantyne, the same area where Sprouts and Publix opened their first stores in Charlotte.
- Ballantyne's 28277 ZIP code has a median household income of $128,627 and is 58% white, according to census data.
Case in point: In east Charlotte, the median household income is $52,723, roughly three-fifths of the metro area's. The population is 71% Black and Hispanic.
- "Trying to explain this to neighbors — it's like, no, guys, we're not getting a Wegmans. We're not getting a Trader Joe's," says Greg Asciutto, CharlotteEAST's executive director.
- At Eastland Yards, developer Crosland Southeast has long promised but yet to secure a specialty grocer.
- Asciutto argues that the concentration of publicly funded affordable housing on the east side is keeping the median income too low to attract amenities.
- "It's not about density," Lempert says. "It's about how often somebody's going to shop, and what they're going to put in their basket."
Between the lines: To stretch margins, grocers are romanticizing the shopping experience with prepared meals and theatrical displays, like workers cracking cheese wheels.
- Lower-income communities can't always support those luxuries.
- Earlier this year, a Harris Teeter off Idlewild Road in east Charlotte quietly closed after a "strategic market review."
Zoom out: Much of west Charlotte is a food desert.
- The average age of death in the West Boulevard area is 65, versus 72 countywide.
- That's an 11-year gap from Ballantyne, where the typical life expectancy is 76.
The latest: Wells Fargo recently stepped up to commit $1.5 million to The Three Sisters Market, a project nearly a decade in the making on West Boulevard.
- Historic West End Partners secured $4 million in city funding for a food co-op at Beatties Ford and West Fifth Street, incorporating it into a six-story housing and office building to make the project financially viable.
- "You have to deliver a total experience these days for it to be profitable or sustainable," says J'Tanya Adams of Historic West End Partners.
Yes, but: Co-ops face the same economic challenges that prevent traditional grocers from opening in the area in the first place:
- High food stamp use, higher theft-prevention costs, and higher labor costs because employees would rather work at another store, Lempert says.
- Lempert says the best solutions to food access are mobile food units, pop-ups at transit stations, and city-packaged incentives for grocery stores, such as free land and tax breaks.
The bottom line: Wegmans plans to open more North Carolina stores. The not-so-wealthy corners of the city already know they won't be chosen, and they aren't waiting anymore.
