Business

The sign out front still says Alaskan & Proud, but the new Foodland IGA is now open in the only large-scale grocery space in downtown Juneau.

A & P shut its doors on Saturday. The supermarket stayed closed on Sunday as employees conducted inventory.

It reopened yesterday (Monday), with the Myers Group, LLC as the new owners. Myers Group recently signed a ten-year lease for the space with the Rosenberger family of Juneau, owners of the Foodland Shopping Center.

KTOO’s Casey Kelly has more.

Myers Group President Tyler Myers says the first product shipment came off the barge Monday morning and started hitting store shelves around 10 a.m.

“I imagine that it will take maybe two weeks before we’re fully stocked up,” Myers says. “We have a lot more product coming on the next load. What came in today was just start filling all the holes, get product back on the shelves. But we’ll have quite a bit more coming.”

Myers says the biggest difference customers will notice right away is the switchover to IGA branded products instead of Western Family. But he says there will still be a variety of choices for most items, and in some cases the selection will expand a bit.

“We’ll be bringing in a whole lot more natural and specialty and organic sort of items into the store,” says Myers. “And then from there, it really will be dictated by what the customers tell us they want.”

He says the store will undergo an extensive remodel, starting in about six months to a year. A few changes have been made already, most notably to the produce section.

“[We] moved the bananas to a different area, so that they aren’t close to the cold air. That will give them a longer life and better quality,” he says.

All of A & P’s remaining employees have been retained. But because so many left in recent months, signs posted on the front doors say the store is currently accepting applications.

Jeremy Schoonover is the new store manager. He specializes in opening stores for the Myers Group, most recently on Camano Island in Washington state.

“They had a marching band here yesterday and we received flowers here today,” Schoonover says. “To see people so excited, it gives me goose bumps.”

Schoonover says he’ll be with the Juneau store “however long it takes.”

Myers Group and its wholesaler Super Value sent about a dozen employees to Juneau to stock shelves this week. Schoonover says one thing is making life a little easier for them.

“This store has the largest back room I’ve ever seen,” he says. “So that makes it so much easier, so much more of a relief. Because I can run around and order. I’ve been ordering groceries for so many years, it doesn’t really matter where you’re at, people eat near the same thing.”

Myers Group operates five IGA stores in western Washington, including markets in downtown Seattle and Tacoma. It also runs hardware stores and service stations. This is the company’s first foray into Alaska.

Foodland IGA is open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, though Myers says the hours will probably expand once the store adds more products.

Downtown Juneau’s only large-scale full service grocer is closed Sunday while employees work to transition from Alaskan & Proud ownership to the new Myers Group Foodland IGA.

Signs on the front doors say the store will re-open Monday at 6 a.m. with the same limited store hours as before A & P closed.

A group of Juneau residents continue to explore the possibility of starting a cooperative grocery store, despite last week’s announcement that Myers Group IGA will soon be anchor tenant in Foodland Shopping Center.

The Capital City Market Cooperative formed in a bid to take over the space, currently occupied by Alaskan & Proud. Organizers now say they’ll focus on other locations in a feasibility study.

It came as no surprise to Capital City Market organizer Evelyn Rousso that Myers Group and Foodland, Inc. had reached a deal for downtown Juneau’s only full service grocery store. And it doesn’t change the group’s plans to do a market study.

“It just takes one option off the table,” Rousso says. “The person who’s doing our study is looking at a variety of options, and replacing the A&P store was to be one of them and now it won’t be.”

Seattle area grocery consultant Hambleton Resources will conduct the study. The firm will look at Juneau’s demographics and existing grocery store options, then analyze whether a co-op would work in the Capital City. Rousso says possible locations will be just one aspect of the report.

“For the sake of the study we identified some specific intersections, but with the understanding that it’s not really that important to pinpoint a location,” she says. “It’s more for general areas. So, we’ll look in the Willoughby District downtown, Douglas, and potentially one out the road somewhere.”

Capital City Market has raised nearly $18,000 for the study through a founding member drive. If the report says a co-op is feasible, Rousso says the group would probably need to raise at least a couple million more to cover startup costs. By comparison, a group in Fairbanks that plans to open Alaska’s first food co-op this fall has raised nearly $1.5 million.

[box type=”shadow”]“It would attract people from all over the community. We are looking at doing something that would be organic and natural, but also have conventional. It would feature local products, especially local seafood. Our marketing study will tell us the mix that could work here.” – Evelyn Rousso, organizer Capital City Market Cooperative[/box]

The market study will determine whether to move forward. But Rousso says her personal feeling is that Juneau would welcome a grocery co-op.

“I think it’s a great business model for Juneau, and I think we could have one of the best stores in Juneau,” Rousso says. “It would attract people from all over the community. We are looking at doing something that would be organic and natural, but also have conventional. It would feature local products, especially local seafood. Our marketing study will tell us the mix that could work here.”

Rousso and other co-op organizers had preliminary talks with Foodland, Inc. President Gary Rosenberger about the Alaskan & Proud space. Rosenberger says he liked what he heard, but the Myers Group was able to move more quickly.

“It was a really good second option. Probably it might have been a good first option. But they needed a lot more time in order to get in there,” Rosenberger says. “Maybe we might have been dark for months before they could move in.”

Foodland and the Myers Group announced a 10-year lease agreement for the space on Friday. The Myers Group operates five IGA stores in western Washington.

The next step for the Capital City Market is a membership meeting on September 21st, where a board of directors will be elected from among the more than 40 founding members. Rousso expects the market study to be done in the next month or so.

“Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.” Those words come from the 18th Century French Moralist, Joseph Joubert.

You could say it this way:

“While they have the ideas, those ideas don’t translate into action unless there’s skilled labor to help them do it.”

That’s Alaska Public Employees Association business agent Pete Ford, one of several members of Juneau’s Central Labor Council that puts on the annual community picnic each Labor Day.

Monday’s was the sixth since the Council got the idea and it’s grown every year. Ford says they planned on food for four hundred people, but that wasn’t enough to feed all those who came.

Union signs hang outside the Sandy Beach shelter; inside, political candidates line up to thank Juneau workers and remind them to vote in the upcoming fall elections.

This Labor Day picnic is not just the last hurrah of summer, which the federal holiday seems to have become in many places. Labor Day was born out of the union movement and the effort to improve workers’ conditions in the 19th century.

To the guys flipping burgers at Juneau’s picnic in 2012, that should not be forgotten.

“Labor Day is a celebration of the people who built this fine county,” says Local 71 business agent Tom Brice, and Central Labor Council member. “Not Democrat or Republican, but the working people of America and the working people, in this case, of Alaska and Juneau.”

Around the country, the labor movement has lost strength over the last four decades. Union membership and union influence have decreased. Twenty-three states are now considered “right to work,” with laws that prohibit union security agreements.

Alaska has strong labor laws and Brice says it’s important the young state remains pro-union, especially because of the “seasonality of the work that we have. The cost associated with health care, the cost of living. Those very factors that Alaska’s working people face require that we have good health care, benefits and pensions,”. Brice says.

Right to work legislation was filed in the Alaska Legislature last year and though it made little progress, Ford is concerned that labor union strength in Alaska may be waning.

“The state has shifted to a more conservative mentality as construction has died down. Construction is what usually drives labor unions and involvement in labor unions. And after the plant, if you will, is built and things are humming along, people seem to forget how they got there,” Ford says. “We need to recreate a situation where there is better balance and equality when we go to the bargaining table and that the rights of both the workers as well as the owner are being observed.”

In Alaska, the AFL-CIO – an umbrella federation — represents about 60,000 members in some 50 affiliated unions statewide, including state workers. More than 15,000 employees of the state of Alaska are represented by unions.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14.8 million workers in the country were represented by labor unions last year, about 11.8 percent of the workforce.

A lease has been signed with the Myers Group to open Foodland IGA on Sept. 9, the day after Alaskan and Proud closes its doors.

Myers Group, LLC president, Tyler Myers, has signed a 10-year lease with options, says Gary Rosenberger, President of Foodland, Inc.

“People from outside that know the Myers Group have nothing but good things to say about the Myers Group, and so we’re happy. We’re also just happy to have somebody,” Rosenberger says. “I was worried that it might go dark down there at Foodland and I’d be down there mopping up floors from thawed out freezers, but that isn’t going to happen, so yeah, I’m thrilled.”

Rosenberger says he met with Tyler Myers and a representative from the wholesale company Super Value, when they visited Juneau a couple months ago.

“He told me that he tries to set the store up by looking at the people who live in the area,” Rosenberger says. “He wants to go a little more top end, I think, and he wants to pretty it up inside. He’ll spend some money and we might have to, too, in order to get it up to what he needs. The salesman that was with him sells groceries all the way from Kenai to South America and he says that Myers stores are beautiful and they’re run real nice, so that was enough for me.”

John Williams of Juneau Real Estate brokered the deal. Rosenberger says Williams had his “feelers out” for some time to find the right company. Williams would not be interviewed, but in a news release he said Alaska Marine Lines played an important role in getting Foodland, Inc and the Myers Group together. “AML gave us numerous names and phone numbers of businesses in the Pacific Northwest, and one of those calls lead us to the Myers Group. We think they are the best possible choice we could have made.”

Rosenberger says the next step is to find a retailer to fill the empty space next to the supermarket. The 6,000 square foot space was once part of Foodland Super Drug, which shrunk several years ago to a small pharmacy and gift shop. The pharmacy in the store recently moved to WalMart.

“Hopefully we can get another drug store in there,” Rosenberger says.

He says it wasn’t clear if Myers Group would need more space, so they decided not to market the empty store until the grocery deal was signed. He says once Foodland IGA gets set up, he will talk with Myers about additional space requirements.

According to Rosenberger, Tyler Myers told him he would like to have a drug store in Foodland IGA, but “he didn’t say he would go forth and try to find one. But if he doesn’t we may shop around,” Rosenberger says.

The Whidbey Island-based Myers Group operates five IGA stores in western Washington, including markets in downtown Seattle and Tacoma. Myers says the Juneau store is great opportunity to grow his business, which also includes gas stations and hardware stores.

“I was asked to come up about two months ago to come up and take a look at the store and see if we had an interest, and absolutely, positively fell in love with the community and what I saw, he says.”

Myers says he’ll retain all the A & P employees. He also expects to undertake an extensive remodel sometime in the next year, essentially modernizing the inside of the store. Myers says he’s planning to put his own money into the upgrades, and keep the store open throughout the process.

He says he’ll seek customer input before making any changes.

“We’re not a company that is cookie cutter, every store is exactly the same like you might see with a chain store. If we have a customer that comes in and says, ‘Hey we’re looking for a certain kind of ethnic food,’ then we have a lot of suppliers and we are able to go out and find that item. And that’s really how our stores are merchandised and that’s what dictates how we go to business,” Myers says.

Details of the agreement signed by the Myers Group and Foodland, Inc. were not released. The Foodland Shopping Center is on the market for $13.5 million, but Myers declined to say if the agreement includes a right of first refusal on any sale. The Foodland center’s assessed value is $15.3. The Myers Group is in the business of shopping center development, and Myers says he might be interested in buying the complex at some point — just not right now.

The Juneau Planning Commission has approved a cellphone tower along Montana Creek Road.

The 105-foot GCI tower will include a 5-foot lightning rod and antennas.

GCI representative Wayne Haerer said the site will enhance the signal strength for voice, digital data and text to the Mendenhall Valley, where the signal is inadequate.  He says he hopes to have a contractor in place before the end of September.

CBJ Community Development planner Laura Boyce said the tower would be seen about 20 to 30 feet about the trees. It must be painted green or brown to blend into the vegetation as much as possible.

Many Montana Creek area residents oppose the tower, including CBJ Assembly member Ruth Danner. In a letter to the Planning Commission, Danner said commissioners should delay their decision until the city has developed a cellphone town policy.  She also cited the need to know the health effects of electromagnetic frequencies.

Deputy community Development Director Greg Chaney said municipalities cannot regulate based on health effects.

“Federal communications law prohibits local jurisdictions from regulating strictly on health effects.  Planning commissions, it you want to take that on, you have to be ready to go to the Supreme Court, because it’s a clear provision in federal law,” Chaney said.

Danner has been fighting cellphone towers since before she ran for the Assembly three years ago.  In this case delaying the decision any longer was not feasible, Boyce said, because federal law requires municipalities act on a complete application for a tower within 150 days.