Food City expands at old Kmart site
Hutton, a Chattanooga-based commercial real estate, development, and investment company, broke ground Tuesday on a new Food City supermarket that will anchor a new retail development in Albertville, Alabama.
Hutton is redeveloping the shuttered 70,000-square-foot Kmart into a 74,000 square foot shopping center that will include a Food City grocery, Ulta Beaty and Five Below and another retail tenant still under negotiations.
"It is the most significant retail corner in the City of Albertville in terms of traffic count, accessibility and visibility," said Albertville Mayor Tracy Honea.
The public-private partnership started when the City Council purchased the former K-Mart site and started meeting with 15 different developers to hear their ideas for Albertville to create more jobs and increase sales tax revenue.
"You don't see many towns and cities make those bold, important moves that can change the platform and the ripple effect this development is going to have for many years," said Karen Hutton, president and chief executive officer of Hutton.."
Hutton later acquired the site and brought the idea of Food City to the table for Albertville Marketplace. Food City will offer a wide variety of services and conveniences, ranging from in-store bakery/delis, complete with hot food and café seating areas to a floral boutique. The store will also provide full-service meat and seafood departments that offer top-quality meats pre-marinated, a pharmacy and a Gas N' Go fuel station.
Farmers gain from corn, soybean prices
Things are looking up for farmers as harvest gets underway - at least for those outside the areas hit by a severe storm called a derecho in early August - thanks to a mix of increased demand from China and the misfortune of farmers in other states.
Corn and soybean prices are both up by about a fifth since early August and the hog rally has been even more pronounced.
"These prices, with these yields, should make things look financially much better than they did back during the summer, because it looked kind of bleak, really," said Rick Anderson, risk manager for Goodhue-based Ag Partners, which operates several grain elevators in southeast Minnesota and southwest Wisconsin. "When you combine that with some of the government aid that they've received and are projected to receive, that will help of course, too."
The biggest reason corn and soybean prices have rallied is that China is purchasing more of them from the U.S. in recent weeks. Tuesday marked the 13th straight business day in which China bought U.S. soybeans.
Ford, union settle for Toronto plant
The union representing Canadian auto workers says it has reached a tentative three-year contract deal with Ford to build five new electric vehicles at a factory near Toronto.
Unifor President Jerry Dias says the deal was reached early Tuesday after an all-night bargaining session.
It includes $1.95 billion Canadian ($1.46 billion) in factory investments at Ford's three Canadian factories that employ about 5,400 workers.
Most of the money will go to an assembly plant in Oakville, Ontario. The first electric vehicle will start rolling off the assembly line in 2025 with production of the fifth starting in 2028.
The Oakville plant's current products, the Ford Edge and Lincoln Nautilus, will go out of production in 2023.
Walmart to test drone deliveries
Walmart Inc. will test using drones to drop COVID-19 diagnostic kits at customers' homes, the retailer's latest move in the pandemic-fueled arena of contactless deliveries.
The company is piloting drone delivery of at-home coronavirus self-collection kits in North Las Vegas and Cheektowaga, New York, it said in a blog post Tuesday. It's partnering with Quest Diagnostics Inc. and DroneUp, a Virginia-based drone services provider that works across various industries.
There's no customer cost for the service, which delivers nasal swab kits to patients living within one mile of the local Walmart supercenter in those two markets. The kits include pre-paid shipping labels to send the samples back to Quest.
The goal of the experiment is to "shape contactless testing capabilities on a larger scale," said Tom Ward, Walmart's senior vice president of customer product.