Groceteria.com

Everyone's heard of the Jewel-Osco Grand Bazaars here (hopefully), but what happened to the 95k square foot Jewel-Osco in Orland Park?

I found an article in Supermarket News that refers to an experimental Jewel-Osco that opened in May 1993 in Orland Park that featured expanded variety in all departments plus a Panda Express and McDonald's. Since the existing JO's in OP seem to be smaller and not 95k square foot, anyone know what happened to this one, or even heard of it?

["Jewel tests fresh-oriented format." Supermarket News 7 June 1993]

EDIT: by 1995, the fast food had been dumped and the whole prepared foods section was remodeled into the "MarketPlace", but I still can't find the actual store of where this was.

It seems to be that the location is 9350 W 159th St. Cook County Appraisals Office certainly seems to support this, saying that the building is 22 years old, classificiation supermarket. (Pin: 27-15-301-033-0000)

Well, that was fun. Never knew that Jewel-Osco stores got that big!

I know it was around that time that Smiths started building similar sized stores in it's failed attempt to re-enter Southern California and Vons even built a couple that large around then, too. But most retailers realized that was too much square footage for a supermarket and most have stuck with 50,000-70,000 square feet. Probably Jewel-Osco was getting their feet wet with this new size at the same time and must have come to the same conclusions as the others.

Well, Jewel-Osco did buy some Dominick's which were formerly Omni stores...a suspiciously large store at 2550 North Clybourne has been confirmed to be an old Omni. The Omni that bought Auchan in Chicago was demolished several years back, dunno if it ever became Dominick's. The fact that the adjacent Chuck E. Cheese and stuff have a lower roof line also suggests that the Clybourne store was never downsized. LINK

I'm surprised I haven't been able to find a list of Omni stores anywhere...over a dozen were converted to regular Dominick's stores later, and they almost hit 100k square feet.

According to Wikipedia (which hasn't seen much updates since Dominick's went under), the Clybourn Avenue store was the last Omni open as a Dominick's.