Buckhead has the Restaurants; North Fulton has the Grocery Stores
categories: Local Market Conditions, Stuff I like to talk about
Living in Alpharetta is nice because you’re close enough to the good restaurants in Buckhead for nice meals on special occasions but also near a growing collection of really great grocery stores.
I’m not talking about Kroger and or even the new Publix at Birmingham Crossroads, of course. It’s much better than that. To the West, North Fulton is host to
the newest Trader Joe’s on HWY 92 at King Road. To the East is a monster Whole Foods on State Bridge Road at Medlock Bridge. In between is a Fresh Market in Newtown and Harry’s Farmers Market off HWY 9.
The other day, my family ventured into the new Whole Foods. I don’t know whether to call it a grocery store or a restaurant because they have some many “food stations” where you can eat, not to mention the salad bar and hot bar. We all wound up having dinner there.
When I first graduated college, I lived in Palo Alto for a time and Whole Foods had just opened its first store in California there. I used to ride my bike there and buy fish for stir fry - heck, everyone road their bike, it was California! The store, back then, was nice enough, but it was small and quaint. The
store in Alpharetta is the Taj Mahal of grocery stores.
Harry’s Farmers Market was purchased by Whole Foods a couple of years ago, and while the store underwent a facelift and reorganization, it retained a lot of its original market warehouse feel. It still has a huge fish counter, blue crabs in the box during season and reindeer in the parking lot for Christmas.
Harry’s (and its brother store the DeKalb Farmers Market) were founded as international food markets and my European father-in-law who now lives state-side disappears for long periods of time to Harry’s on every trip to Alpharetta. He always returns with great selections of wine, cheese, pate, breads, honey, jam and, of course, chocolate. Anyone addicted to the Truffled Walnuts like I am?
From a housing perspective, if you want to live somewhere where you can get good eats, North Fulton is the place. I had a client once tell me that the way she picked where she wanted to live is by studying where Jersey Mike’s and Fresh Market opened new stores. She said those companies had a stated plan of looking for high-end demographics and she used them as her leading indicator.
It is certainly not a scientific method, but relying on the research of large corporate chains can’t be all wrong because they are selecting North Fulton over and over again to locate their stores. And in the end, even if the grocery chains get it wrong - which they haven’t - at least we will eat well and that is really want matters!
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