The ink is dry on a grocer’s lease in Tacoma’s downtown core.
Tyler Myers, president of Whidbey Island-based The Myers Group, confirmed Tuesday that the lease is official at Pacific Plaza, a former city parking garage that was redeveloped into an environmentally friendly office building through a partnership between private developers and the City of Tacoma.
The News Tribune reported in early January that that an agreement had been reached for a 16,000-square-foot store on the south side of the building at 1250 Pacific Ave.
“We announced our engagement, it took awhile to finish the prenuptials, and now we have a marriage license,” Dan Putnam, one of the owners of Pacific Plaza, said Tuesday.
Myers said the store will be branded an IGA, but he hasn’t decided on a name yet. Putnam said store construction will start by the end of the month, with the goal of opening the store in July. It will be a full-service store, Myers said, catering to office workers, residents and visitors.
Putnam has said that the lease agreement reflected shared risk for coming in to a market that hasn’t had a full-size grocer in decades. He said in January that the lease is for five years, with five additional five-year options and a rent rent structure that ties the rental rate to the store’s volume. Pacific Plaza’s owners will pay for the store’s construction.
On Tuesday, Myers wouldn’t give details of his company’s investment other than to say “it’s significant.”
“We signed a long-term lease, so we’re in it. We don’t go into any market we do business in just to see how it goes,” he said. “We go into a market thinking we’ll be there for 40 years.”
The Myers Group owns and operates four other grocery stores in Washington, including the Kress IGA near Pike Place Market in Seattle. The Kress store is an instructive example for measuring success, Myers said, despite the fact that many more people live and work near the Seattle store.
The Kress IGA is in the building’s basement, and the only available parking is paid on-street spots. But the store is busy all day, Myers said. Though the average sale per customer might be lower than a standard supermarket, customers make up the difference by making more frequent trips.
In Tacoma, shoppers can park in Pacific Plaza’s garage, and Myers said store shoppers can have the fee validated. Plus, the Tacoma IGA will be the only full grocer in the downtown core.
“Yes there’s a lot of people in Seattle but there’s also a lot of choices,” Myers said. “If you can walk 20 feet you can find a place that sells a lot of the same things that the guy across the street.”
Pacific Plaza now is almost fully leased. The only open spot left is a 2,800-square-foot retail space on the north side of the building, near the reconstructed hill-climb and new public art.
Myers and Putnam said the grocer will be the spark for other retailers in the area.
“It will be nice to see some of the buildings around us, that we don’t own, have their lights come on because of the activity at Pacific Plaza,” Putnam said.