Fresh & Easy Will Be Anchor Tenant at Market Town
— by Jeffrey Wisniewski — 12 April 2010 — 3 comments below »
Fresh & Easy has signed a letter of intent to lease and become the anchor tenant for Market Town, the first phase of New Town Center and the long-term plan following a two-year interim use for the site as the innovative Market Hall. Evidence that Fresh & Easy would be the anchor tenant was first reported last April.1
Fresh & Easy will consume the largest retail space in Market Town and the developer (Red Barn) continues to look for smaller tenants to fill up the remaining spaces. Hopefully a successful Market Hall experiment will lead to quality and diverse tenants in the long-term.
Fresh & Easy would be the second grocery store in Hercules (although it would be a smaller, more specialized store), along with Lucky, however the City recently purchased the vacant property adjacent to Victoria by the Bay with the purpose of developing a full-sized Safeway (or similar). A smaller grocer has been considered for Sycamore Crossing and a full-sized grocery store has been discussed as well for the City-owned Parcel C (the former Walmart property).
However unrelated, it should be noted that there exists an active group against Fresh & Easy and its parent Tesco, which the group describes as the “Walmart of Britain.” (Update: The claims, of course, may be untrue and/or scurrilous. Wikipedia has an entry on criticism on Tesco.)
- This is not necessarily “news” (the ink is quite dry), but the clock is officially running on the shill blog — Fresh & Easy Buzz — to publish this information as their own, and without attribution, again. Such is a long story that includes a relatively heated back-and-forth email exchange a year ago with the case-in-point coming in the form of a Google-cached web-page. The shill blog used the information and exact images from this site, and even included a link to the PDF saved on my server, but refused to attribute the source and repeatedly denied ever seeing my content prior to publishing their post over the course of several emails discussing proper attribution. This is the Google cache. This was my post. Game, set, match.↩
Hmm. I’m wondering if this is the same old, now new, affordable, fresh and sensible ‘folks market’ concept of English fame spreading among the East Coast? If so, I’m quite pleased.
OK, so even a trained journalist can be duped by marketing spin. Interesting too, how so many business schools do not require an ethics course in core-curriculum. Thus do investigate the findings of the activist group challenging Fresh & Easy’s similar ‘Walmart mentality’ parent-company, Tesco for yourself.
@Althea — Good point. Here is a 2007 report on Tesco’s purported image problem (UK Times). I have also added an advisory sentence following the link.