NORTHBOROUGH, Mass. -- About four months after New England Pantry opened its Pantry Gourmet test store, the retailer is retooling the site, noting that consumers didn't understand the concept of the store in Northborough, Mass. "It's been very successful in a lot of ways. We really have a great lunch hour," Chris Brosco of New England Pantry told CSP Daily News. "It really is the c-store part of the operation that's not really clicking or adding the dollars that a normal c-store would add to the operation."
The problem, said Brosco, is that the company was a little [image-nocss] too successful at conveying an upscale image.
"We really did get the Whole Foods-type shopper, but they're shopping it like they would shop a supermarket in the sense that it's once or twice a week," he said. "And we didn't build it in a community that has enough households in it to support that level of infrequency. We really didn't expect that the normal, daily customer that a c-store brings to you would not be in this store."
The site opened with much fanfare at the end of January, boasting a full-service Chock Full O Nuts coffee bar, an expanded product section, a dedicated foodservice/food-prep area and "an eclectic mix of traditional, specialty, natural and organic groceries."
The result?
"We're also a little bit concerned that the store may be presenting itself as expensive," Brosco said. "We're seeing people are coming in for what's on sale, and they're not really shopping for other things. They're heading straight in to get the sale item and they're not really looking at the prices [on our other products]. But we've created an atmosphere that looks expensive, and I think the interpretation is that it is expensive."
After reviewing the early results, New England Pantry, a master franchisor of the White Hen brand for the New England area, is retrenching.
"The format and the menu, none of that is going to change," Brosco said. "We're going to make the tobacco counter more visible. We're putting the lottery in. We did our homework, but it's like anything else when you do research surveys. When people were asked about tobacco and lottery, they told us they'd rather not have it in their c-store.
But what they said and what they did were two different things.
"They failed to tell us that convenience is really the biggest thing," Brosco said, "and they really don't want to make four or five stops, nor do they have time to make four or five stops to get things."
This isn't the end of the Pantry Gourmet concept, however. With a goal of "redefining and blending several channels of business," New England Pantry will open a second Pantry Gourmet site in Plainville, Mass., late this summer.
"That one from the get-go was always going to have lottery, was always going to have tobacco, and we have the additional benefit of a beer and wine license there," Brosco said. "So we think that store's going to open up much differently than this one did."
And if things don't pick up at the Northborough site, "the very last thing we'd do is put the name White Hen over the door because there are someinefficiencies with our advertisingand we knew this coming out of the gate," Brosco said. "There's a tremendous amount of White Hen messages out there that this store doesn't have the advantage of. We have to advertise for this store independently, and because it's only one location, we don't use radio or a lot of our typical media. It's more often in-home, direct-mail pieces or weekly inserts in newspapers."
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