HYBRID STORES TAKEN AN URBAN TURN

Hot off the pages of trend-savvy Los Angeles magazine is the news that among startup businesses and older shops in search of reinvigorization, multitasking is fast emerging as a marketing strategy. “Stores have begun offering whimsical and often bizarre combinations of goods and services to consumers bound by extreme time constraints or prone to some highly eclectic retail tastes,” according to the story.

Yes, avant garde retailers are playing the lazy (I mean time-pressed) consumer card once again in order to justify new tests of our tolerance for the strange. Here are a few examples that have popped up in El Lay, as described by Los Angeles’ intrepid writer Jiyeon Yoo:
• The EZ New Web Laundromat & Café in culver City ameliorates the late-night fluff-and-fold with four Apple desktops, free wireless connectivity and gourmet drinks and victuals.
• Santa Monica’s Legal Grind serves steaming lattes to be consumed during a $25 consultation with an attorney on a divorce proceeding or real estate law.
• Theatre Xpresso at downtown’s Pacific Center has turned the old dinner-theater model into a hyperaccelerated lunch-and-live-drama combo for less than $20.
• Silver Lake’s Bittersweet Butterfly is part lingerie boutique, part flower shop, where racy intimates can be woven into bouquets of roses.
• For Fairfax residents devoted to their Camaro, their canine and/or ultraorthodox dietary laws, Josh’s Top Fuel offers premium unleaded, glatt kosher sandwiches and burritos. And?first in the nation?a semiautomated, token-operated, U.K.-made dog-washing machine.

For my money, these joints represent the urbanization of something that has been fairly commonplace?for years!?in more countrified venues. Many years ago, when I was traveling the back roads of provincial Nebraska in search of photo opportunities, I stumbled onto a place in one small town that surely was a smaller predecessor of Wal-Mart Supercenters.
The store was called Bruckner’s and its slogan was “Everything Good to Eat and Wear.” That’s right?a combination dry goods and grocery store! When I remarked on this to a friend, he told me about a combination feed store and beer joint in a town not too far away. Somehow, I never managed to check that tip out, but I saw no reason to doubt his word, I’m hoping that Food Channel readers will help me prove my point by sending some further examples of combo stores like these, in as much detail as possible!

Art Siemering is Editor-in-Chief of The Food Channel Trendwire. For more information on this weekly e-mail newsletter for food marketers, hit the “Subscribe” button on this Web Site’s front page.

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