Our ‘new’ market
Dear Readers,
In case you are living under a rock, or didn't notice, the folks who run the Hannaford Supermarket spent a ton of dough sprucing up their store in Boothbay Harbor.
Spokesman Eric Blom declined to put a dollar figure on the expansion/renovation project.
“It is substantial,” he said.
The corporation has 59 of its 186 stores in Maine.
As construction workers put the final touches on the outside, everyone inside is pointing to the June 13 grand opening celebration.
Since January, the store has been crawling with contractors, planners, facilitators and navigators, and Hannaford employees from away, helping to reconfigure and update the old store.
Jon Fortier, the temporary boss in charge of the opening, said it was “just time” to redo it.
“The town deserves a newer store,” he said. “It was overdue to remodel it.”
No one could agree more than Chuck Cunningham, the Boothbay selectman who has worked at the store for 33 years. He is currently the produce manager. “It was time,” he said.
While the store is about the same size as before, it has been reconfigured so there is one additional aisle. The move netted about 1,000 square feet of aisle space.
Jean Philbrook, an East Boothbay resident since 1973, is especially pleased that store managers eliminated standing product displays that cluttered the aisles.
“The (old aisles) were crowded. Several times, I was bumped into by summer visitors who were in a hurry,” she said.
The elimination of vendor displays in the aisles was a conscious decision.
“We focus on sales for our revenue. We stock items the customer needs,” Fortier said, explaining their dollars come from the customers buying their items, and not from so called vendor incentives, where a vendor pays for space in the aisles.
Many items in the store have been relocated to different locations, a facet of the renovation process that has caused some customers to become a bit confused.
The Hannaford supervisors understand this. They have stationed store workers, dubbed navigators, to stand in the aisles helping customers locate the items on their grocery list. In addition, the company is preparing printed store guides that will show the location of the 100 most requested items.
Store designers have installed new overhead guides to help us find items. And they took great care to put similar items together in a logical progression. For example, the mustard is shelved near the ketchup, Fortier said.
Cunningham is proud that the store now carries many new items, too.
“We try to keep up with the trends, but we understand there is only so much room in the box,” said Fortier.
The store looks fresh and clean. Managers are focused on hiring a new batch of part-time summer workers to serve the store's busiest season.
All of the effort is just fine for Jean Philbrook.
“I am glad they updated the store,” she said. “We would be in a pickle if they had just shut the door and walked away.”
