'tis the square footage
When I had lunch with Karen last week, the subject of the PCC set to open next year as the anchor tenant on the ground floor of the new, 58-story Rainier Square Tower came up. She immediately assumed that it would be the largest grocery store downtown, and I immediately doubted it. But, I didn't have square footage figures on hand.
I kept thinking about researching this and then forgetting. Today, though, I missed the 6:56 a.m. bus and had to walk all the way down to Melrose to catch one; then, when I got to 3rd, there was no connecting bus coming soon enough to make it worth waiting for and I could walk the rest of the way just as fast. I did a lot of walking to work this morning as a result, and so I got on my phone to look this stuff up. Karen was unaware of the Kress IGA supermarket on 3rd Avenue, which has been there something like a decade already. And when I found online estimates of sizes, it was looking like Karen might actually have been right, and the PCC would be the biggest grocery store downtown.
But! When I asked Scott about it this morning, and I also said I'd like to get myself a list of the square footage of all PCC stores because I keep asking about it and I'd like to have the reference handy, he said I should ask our Construction Project Manager, a guy named Collin. I can't remember if I've ever even properly met this guy, who is kind of new, but I did email him. He then referred me to a woman named Jean, our Construction Administrative Assistant. She was very helpful, and quite quickly supplied the square footage of not only all 13 stores that currently exist, but even the two set to open next year. And I shall share that information with you now!
She sent the list to me in order of store openings.
Kirkland (opened 1978): 13,142 square feet
View Ridge (1987): 8,970
Greenlake (1996): 12,741
Issaquah (1999): 24,500
Fremont (2003): 19,500
Redmond (2006): 23,382
Edmonds (2008): 25,525
Greenlake Village (2014): 26,822
Columbia City (2015): 24,845
Bothell (2016): 24,825
Burien (2018): 25,490
West Seattle (2019): 24,212
Ballard (2019): 24,979
Bellevue (2020): 25,323
Downtown (2020): 17,543
Side note: it is true that our expansion in the past couple of years has been aggressive to an unprecedented degree regardless, but this list also gives an artificial sense of lower frequency of openings in its early years. We actually have three stores currently standing that are replacements of earlier iterations for their respective neighborhoods: the Fremont store that opened in 2003 replaced another store a block away that had originally opened in 1994 (this was the first PCC I ever entered, after moving to Seattle and before getting hired); the Columbia City store that opened in 2015 replaced the much older Seward Park store that had originally opened in 1985 (and until its closing was the second-oldest store still operating); and the West Seattle store we just re-opened this past October, while in the exact same spot, was still part of a redevelopment that replaced the old store that had originally opened in 1989, and then had to close temporarily for two years as of 2017.
Anyway! I plugged all this info into my handy-dandy, multi-tab "PCC histories" excel document, and I have the store sizes listed twice. First, as above, in order of store opening; and then, as below, sorted from largest to smallest:
Greenlake Village: 26,822 square feet
Edmonds: 25,525
Burien: 25,490
Bellevue: 25,323
Ballard: 24,979
Columbia City: 24,845
Bothell: 24,825
Issaquah: 24,500
West Seattle: 24,212
Redmond: 23,382
Fremont: 19,500
Downtown: 17,543
Kirkland: 13,142
Greenlake: 12,741
View Ridge: 8,970
As you can see, our newer stores tend to be the bigger ones. Except for downtown! It's actually set to be our fourth-smallest store—and, getting back to the original point, I figured out that it will not be the biggest grocery store downtown after all. But! It will be the second-largest grocery store downtown, or at least in the Central Business District or anywhere close to it:
1. Kress IGA Supermarket (1427 3rd, between Pike and Union): 19,376 sq ft
2. PCC Downtown (1301 5th Ave): 17,543 sq ft
3. H Mart (Asian grocery just opened in October, 1601 2nd Ave, entrance actually on Pike between 1st and 2nd): 15,000 sq ft
This list, incidentally, excludes the Whole Foods at Westlake & Denny (47,000 sq ft) and Uwajimaya in the International District (35,000 sq ft), neither of which are anywhere near the heart of downtown, as the three locations listed above are. Those two are much, much bigger than the three in the CBD, but they are respectively on the north and south edges of downtown and only barely count as "downtown" grocery stores. They certainly aren't convenient to anyone around the Pike-Pine Corridor through downtown.
(Capitol Hill, the neighborhood just to the east of downtown and in which I live, is very much a different story. Not only do we have no fewer than six full-scale grocery stores west of 19th Avenue alone, three of them are QFC stores, and two of them—Central Co-op and yet another Whole Foods, which opened last year at Broadway and Madison—are natural foods stores with very similar product selections to PCC. But, this is all at minimum a mile away from the heart of downtown.)
Should I tell you about my evening last night? It's actually still PCC-related! Because about 13 of us from the Merchandising Department had our "Holiday Night Out," as organized by Justine, the Center Store Director (Scott's boss).
Scott was at first assuming I would just stay at work until the show, which was at Benaroya Hall, like he did. But, unlike him, I did not have to go all the way to Issaquah to go home, and I walked home as usual. I did not see Shobhit as he worked until 6:30, and it was right at that time I left again to catch the #12 back downtown, after making myself a veggie hot dog for dinner.
There was some discussion about meeting for drinks before the show, but Justine was never able to get anything organized for that in particular. Unfortunately, I did not see any of the late emails from a couple select smaller grounds informing the rest of us of pre-show plans until this morning, as they were sent after I left the office at 4:30 yesterday. I still got to Benaroya Hall at about 7:00 just in case a group was there already. I was particularly unsurprised to see Scott there already in the lobby, looking at his phone, when I arrived. We chatted a while and then maybe 15 minutes before the show we all went through the doors.
I know Lynne brought a friend, and David the new-ish Meat Merchandiser appeared to have brought his wife. So I'd guess our group numbered 15 people. I wound up sitting next to Robin B, the Fresh Program Manager, with whom I had golfed at Flatstick Pub when we did a department outing there back in January. She never talks to me much on the rare days she is in the office, but, much like the day last January, she sure chatted me up before the show and during intermission last night. We learned we are both atheists who still really love Christmas and Christmas music. She apparently grew up Catholic; I informed her I was born a fundamentalist Baptist.
She said she had seen one other Seattle Men's Chorus concert before, a couple of years ago, and it was the only other time she had been in Benaroya Hall. I couldn't even tell you how many shows I have seen there, and how many different types: Seattle Symphony once; other Seattle Men's Chorus concerts as far back as 2000 (when I had the flu but did not want to waste the ticket, and seriously narrowly avoided barfing right there in my seat); The Kinsey Sicks (in their smaller theater room). A quick search of my Google Calendar account shows five events there dating back to 2008, two of them Seattle Women's Chorus concerts. One of them I did mention last night, when I went to see David Sedaris do a reading. That was in 2009. Wow, I didn't realize that was a whole decade ago already. Another one was a "comic duo" symphony show I went to see there with Evan in 2014, which I only barely remember now. In any event, I've seen shows of many types, many times at Benaroya Hall over the 21 years I have lived in Seattle.
Anyway. Also according to my Google Calendar archives, the last Seattle Men's Chorus concert that was just them that I saw was in March 2016, in Renton with Laney; a bit more recently, I went to a joint Men's Chorus and Women's Chorus concert just in April last year, when they had Randy Rainbow as an honestly kind of disappointing live musical guest. I went to that one with Shobhit. Actually, I've still seen Men's Chorus concerts more recently than I thought, although it's been a really long time—more than a decade—since I last went to see one of their fabled holiday shows. (I might have otherwise, but while Laney was singing with them, I tended to favor the Seattle Women's Chorus concerts instead.)
The show last night was a lot of fun, though. I had hoped I could get a group shot of all of us who went to the show, but we were never all of us together except when seated. They did bring up the lights for a sing-along, though, so I got this lovely shot, which shows four of my coworkers from the back—and shows how much Justine was really into it, with her arms up in the air. It's still a great shot to include in my annual "Year at PCC" photo digest email I'll send out to PCC people on New Year's Eve. Once the show was over, we pretty much all of us got lost in the crowds leaving and I never saw anyone again last night as soon as I was out of the auditorium. I walked over to Pike to catch a #11 bus back home.
[posted 12:24 pm]