The Grocery Bar is in the former Enzo's Market location.A few bags of Tostitos, marshmallows and cans of Campbell's chicken noodle soup lined a few of the otherwise bare shelves at Grocery Bar on Monday evening. A lone cashier worked the checkout aisle, scanning and swiping away the last vestiges of the Grocery Bar experiment.
Monday's blight wasn't the result of wintry weather forecasts, it was a symptom of managing partner Sam Turner's effort to bring the store back to its Enzo's grocery store roots.
A new order of groceries should arrive on Thursday or Friday, and Turner said he doesn't have any plans to close the store for the turnaround.
"The key is, the most important thing for the store is that it should remain open," he said. "When they closed it before to do the renovation, it was [costly]."
Turner is scaling back the store's kitchen and food bars, renovating the interior and bringing in new groceries to bolster a business that many customers feared would close its doors for good in early February amid what appeared to be a going-out-of-business sale.
Officials indicated in July 2013 that investors had already spent $4 million prior to Enzo's transformation into Grocery Bar, and noted at the time that Enzo's hadn't worked because it lacked prepared food items -- a staple of Grocery Bar -- which have high profit margins, and couldn't do enough volume on the grocery side.
Now, Turner says Grocery Bar's display cases were a "horrible idea" and didn't showcase enough food, especially in the meat department. The cost of paying so many workers in the expanded prepared foods department was too expensive. And there simply weren't enough regular groceries for sale, he said.
"Yeah, we were making better margins on the food [as Grocery Bar compared to Enzo's] and we were selling more food, but we weren't covering the labor cost," Turner said.
Turner decided to keep the grocery store open in some form or fashion due to a public outpouring of support, but called the latest rescue mission a "balancing act." He promised to bring the kitchen cafe back, but in a reduced form that costs less to operate.
As for the recent fire sale that cleared the aisles and left the shelves bare, that was all part of the plan, a way to start over with a blank canvas, he said.
"If you try to reset a store and do it piecemeal, it makes it very difficult to plan it out and lay it out properly," Turner said.
Turner and others have acknowledged that there are few business tightropes more treacherous than a small grocery store, given its dependence on razor-thin margins, a large volume of customers and an inventory of fresh food that becomes quickly worthless if not sold.
February's confusion, turnover and mixed signals coming out of Grocery Bar, which appeared to have all but shut down on Feb. 5 amid contradictory messages on the store's status, was merely a symptom of a business model that had reached the end of its lifespan, Turner said.
There was also confusion over who actually owned the store. Turner in 2014 indicated that Daniel Lindley, chef at Alleia Restaurant, had bought a stake in the store, yet Lindley on Monday released a statement that he never made any investment and merely performed a 16-week volunteer consulting engagement.
Lindley, like Turner, admits the Grocery Bar experiment -- in which the grocery store made much of its money from prepared food instead of traditional grocery items -- was a long shot.
"Based on the losses Enzo's Market suffered in its first year of business, we knew Grocery Bar would be a highly difficult concept to make sustainable," Lindley said. "Simply put, the size of the property and the liabilities associated were too large for the Southside neighborhood to support."
Together with his wife, Turner says he is currently the single largest shareholder in the enterprise, though the couple does not own a majority stake in the venture, which they co-own with a number of other investors whom Turner declined to name.
Contact staff writer Ellis Smith at 423-757-6315 or esmith@timesfreepress.com with tips and documents.
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