The Dominick’s grocery chain announced on Feb. 2 that it will close 14 “underperforming” stores in the Chicago area, including its North Riverside store, which has served that area for three decades.
According to the company, the store closures are part of a plan to “revitalize” the chain, which has struggled to compete in the Chicago market since its acquisition by California-based Safeway Inc. in 1998. In addition to the store closures, Dominick’s plans to invest in what it calls its upscale “lifestyle” format. Some 20 stores will be remodeled into lifestyle stores, complete with full-service meat and seafood counters, full-service bakeries and a large selection of natural and organic foods.
Dominick’s spokeswoman Wynona Redmond said that a firm date for the North Riverside store closure was not set, but that it would likely take place “in the next 60 days or so.” Asked how many employees would be affected by the closure, Redmond said that she wasn’t sure, but said that the stores targeted for closure generally had 50 or fewer employees, many of them part-timers.
Asked why the North Riverside store was closing, Redmond said, “There was no single reason. There’s usually a number of factors, but it’s not possible to disclose anything specifically.”
Clearly, however, the North Riverside store has been struggling for years. Its aisles are often empty of shoppers and the parking lot has few vehicles.
It wasn’t always that way. The store opened in 1977 and did well enough to require a large expansion during the early 1990s. But the store’s fortunes began to change in 1998. The first blow came in February of that year, when a 40-by-40-foot section of the store’s roof came crashing down on shoppers, injuring 13. One of the most severely injured was 82-year-old Rose Domenick, who was trapped under debris for nearly two hours.
Domenick subsequently filed lawsuits against a roofing company working at the store at the time of the incident, the then-property owner and Dominick’s. The suits were settled in 2000, with Domenick collecting over $4 million from the various defendants, including Dominick’s, although the terms of the grocery chain’s settlement were never disclosed.
In October of 1998, Safeway Inc. bought the family-owned Dominick’s chain for $1.2 billion. But merchandising changes, most notably the decision to replace Dominick’s brand items with Safeway Select products, were not met favorably by customers. By 2002, Safeway was locked in a bitter labor dispute with workers belonging to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.
Late in 2002, with a workers’ strike looming, Safeway put Dominick’s up for sale and settled with the union on a short-term deal. Safeway received an offer for the store, but rejected it. By January 2004, Dominick’s announced it would close 12 Chicago-area stores, although the North Riverside store was not on that list.
“We talked to [Dominick’s] at that point, but they said they were not doing all that badly,” said Hugh Robinson, executive vice president of acquisitions for Westchester-based Tri-Land Properties, which bought the North Riverside Park Plaza shopping center in 2003. “But sales continued to deteriorate.”
Robinson said that Dominick’s still has over five years remaining on its lease for the 58,000-square-foot space at the western end of the shopping center, adding that his company hasn’t identified a replacement tenant yet.
“We don’t have a real clear cut direction,” Robinson said. “While it was clear that the store was not doing well over the past few years, they hadn’t expressed any interest in closing it.”
Robinson said that Tri-Land would be “proactive” in trying to find a new tenant for the largest space in the shopping center.
“Our goal is to refill the space with a viable retailer that will generate traffic for the rest of the tenants,” Robinson said.
In addition to the departure of Dominick’s, Robinson said that the Fifth-Third Bank branch that occupies a stand-alone facility in the shopping center’s parking lot would be closing in March. Tri-Land is currently marketing the space to other banking firms.