Groceteria.com

This store is being closed but I was curious as an article showed up about concern for the "tenants" located within the store. There are more than 10 "tenants" in the store. It appears the tenants are mostly against the front wall similar to how banks etc. are placed in stores, there are just a lot more of them.

So what was this format? Is this a format that was used elsewhere or is this a one off?

The other funny thing is the store got a new logo Kroger Citi Center sign recently. They replaced the entire thing to match the new Kroger logo font. It is interesting to me they kept the "Citi Center" when they flipped to the new logo.

The Atlanta area is the only place I've ever seen this format, but it may exist elsewhere too. It seems to have been targeted toward lower-income areas, based on the few I've seen. Seems to have been a short-lived 80s/90s thing.

Here's an article from the AJC about the first one (in 1986):

Very interesting. Are any others of these still open and with this branding? It appears 590 Cascade in Atlanta may be it, still has the branding. Also got new logo signs.

The fact that the tenant spaces were occupied in this closing store seems to imply to me that the businesses must have gotten foot traffic enough to generate sales that could pay their costs.

Don’t really know of any other locations but I haven’t spent a lot of time in Atlanta recently, so I can’t swear to that. The original location mentioned in the article has carried only Kroger branding at least since 2007, when the Google Street View imagery begins. It looks to have had something of a renovation in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

The Memorial Boulevard store was a relocation of a superstore (or more likely, an older store that was retrofitted as a superstore) in the same center. Atlanta was one of the earliest cities I researched and I really need to revisit it and fill in some holes Now that I have more experience.

Between the internet and David's Atlanta directory, the Decatur store goes back to when Belvedere Plaza opened in 1955. It was named for the adjacent Belvedere Park subdivision. That store was remodeled into a super store with the requesite Brutalist exterior, which still is partially visible. I used to pass by here often but remember the now demolished, but then dead Columbia Mall across the street. Columbia Mall had Davison's (Macy) and Sears, while Belvedere had one of the first branches of Rich's, the more upscale department store, so it was a big deal until Rich's opened a bigger store at South DeKalb Mall a couple miles away. The Columbia Mall site became a Walmart.

This store still has some service businesses inside, including a barber shop, an optical store and a nail salon. The same is true of Cascade and possibly Cleveland Avenue which seems to have at least an H&R Block inside. The Cleveland Avenue store lost its Citi-Center branding sometime in the early 2000s, I've never been in there but it was visible from I-85. The roots of Cleveland Ave as a greenhouse are still visible.

Cascade anchors the long-time business district of the West End neighborhood. It and the area around Memorial Drive have been slowly experiencing gentrification since the late 90s, interrupted for a bit by the housing bubble in the late 2000s.

Thee one location from the late 80s/early 90s that would have been a candidate a similar format would have been the greenhouse on Moreland Avenue which replaced a 1950s store in a nearby shopping center. That store was an ordinary greenhouse--Kroger tried to close it when it opened another store some distance away but was convinced to keep it open. Like the 3 Citi-Centers, the area had seen better days but was still either a neighborhood hub or in/near shopping area that was still something of a local draw, although it had lost its anchors (JC Penney, Grants and Woolworth). Cleveland Avenue would have replaced previous Kroger stores in the Stewart-Lakewood area (Stewart is now Metropolitan Parkway).