American Dream

Northwest chain-store Fred Meyer, which invented the Supercenter concept long before Sam Walton got into retail, has been a strong supporter of Portland's anti-big box store policies. The reason is simple: Fred Meyer has two dozen big-box stores in the Portland area, while Wal-Mart has only two, neither of them Supercenters (meaning they don't sell groceries).

Now Fred Meyer has applied to build a new "one-stop-shopping-center" (which is what the late Mr. Meyer called his combinations of food and variety stores) in Beaverton. But planners turned it down, saying it was "not a good fit" with the area. According to planners, a large store surrounded by parking lots "would not encourage neighbors to congregate as a community."

I guess it isn't good enough to offer low prices and a huge variety of products (Fred Meyer advertises that its stores carry 225,000 different items). You also have to promote a sense of community. Of course, as every planner knows, the way to do that is to have your stores front on the sidewalk, not on a parking lot, because all real members of a community walk to their shopping. I wonder what fantasyland those planners live in.

Planners added that their goal for this particular site was to have a "town center" that would serve people in that neighborhood. The Fred Meyer proposal, they were afraid, would attract people from out of the area. Wal-Mart is already planning a regional store in the city, planners said, and they didn't think more than one would be needed. So Fred Meyer gets hung up by the planning rules it once supported.