Plans to build a new grocery store Downtown on Liberty Avenue have been scrapped, according to would-be owners of the store and the Downtown Neighbors Alliance. Well Well (Market) was supposed to open between April and July before plans were ultimately cancelled.
The store was supposed to be started by two Carnegie Mellon University graduates who had experience in the grocery industry. Eric Iacone worked at a Whole Foods Market and Riverwards Produce in Philadelphia and Ivy Hu worked for a family-owned grocery store in China.
The two hoped to bring their knowledge to Pittsburgh.
However, creating a grocery store with only 3,800 square feet of space proved to be too much of a challenge. The building, which last held the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership’s operations dispatch for cleaning crews, is much smaller than traditional grocery stores and the Target inside the former Kaufmann’s building.
For scale, the Target on the corner of Smithfield Street and Fifth Avenue is about 20,000 square feet inside. A typical ALDI store is about the same size, while a convenience store’s footprint is closer to that of what Well Well (Market) planned for.
And according to Iacone, investors were not convinced by the idea, which made the already-shaky plan even more futile.
“The community development financial institution that was expected to support the senior loan took months to come back and say they were changing policy and wouldn’t lend to a startup,” Iacone said. “I was also told specific grant money was going to come through — naively believed it — and it didn’t.”
Plus, the two had trouble getting loans from the government because of Hu’s status as a non-citizen, making the project ineligible for Small Business Administration loans due to an initiative from March, banning foreign nationals and non-citizens from getting any SBA loans.
Iacone said the two were supposed to finalize buying the building in February, but they decided to cancel the project after what he described as too much uncertainty in getting the store running.
According to Iacone, the decision to announce the store’s inception was not his. Rather, it was the Downtown Neighbors Alliance who pushed for the announcement.
“I wish it hadn’t been put out there,” Iacone said, “because we knew this exact thing could happen.”.
But even if the grocery store won’t make it to fruition, the two say they’re thankful for what they learned in the experience and are happy to share the data and information they now have to anyone interested in opening a grocery store Downtown or elsewhere.
And, Iacone said, the struggles in trying to open Well Well taught him why the idea of a grocery store Downtown has seemed much like a pipe dream, even if other funding options might have been available for Well Well. Beyond Target — which itself does not claim to be a grocery store but rather a store that happens to sell groceries — the only available options are convenience stores and CVS.
Market Street Grocery, one of the first attempts at a grocery store Downtown in the last 15 years, closed last February after a 10-year run.
If the store were to open, Well Well would’ve boasted expected grocery products such as produce and dairy, along with a floral shop and a cafe. Additionally, the store would have been part of the Independent Natural Food Retailers Association, which Iacone said was a helpful organization along with the Pittsburgh Food and Beverage Network in trying to figure out if the store’s plan could work.
While it’s unknown if another plan for a grocery store Downtown will spring up, Well Well is far from the only plan — and likely won’t be the last.
And although attempts at bringing grocery stores to the area have increased in the past 20 years, Downtown was not always without one. The first grocery store in the Golden Triangle opened in 1886 inside the Jackson Building on Penn Avenue and Sixth Street, owned by Peter and Anna Schuetz. However, it closed in 1936 and the building burned down in 1948.
Other small grocery stores have existed Downtown on-and-off for decades, but they mostly went away by the 1970s because of competition from large supermarkets.
Before Market Street Grocery, the last go at trying to bring one here was in 2006 with an attempt to bring a store into the old Lazarus building, which is now Piatt Place, or the former G.C. Murphy store, which is now the UFC Gym, DK Sports Pittsburgh and the Market Square Place apartments.
Neither plan was realized.
