Popular local Trader Joe's rival suddenly closing after 40 years

While many analysts and outlets like to discuss how difficult it is to be a retailer, it's pretty hard to be a customer, too. 

These days, customers are faced with a laundry list of challenges to overcome. 

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Rising prices present many of us with difficult decisions at the checkout counter: do we set a budget before buying our groceries? Do we save up for something we'd ordinarily splurge on? And should we leave a couple of items behind until prices finally cool down? 

As the cost of living continues to rise, many customers have reported feeling pinched paying for just the essentials — like housing, fuel, and food — and will instead curb purchases on nonessential goods to make up the difference.

This, in turn, means bad news for retailers. 

Unless a store is taking advantage of rising costs and is price-gouging customers, rising costs mean less business. 

And as fewer customers shop for fewer total items, profits typically dwindle. 

Grocery stores have a unique challenge

Some retailers have been able to pivot as prices rise and customer behaviors change.

Walmart, for instance, has thrown lots of time and resources into its e-commerce service, Walmart+, which now acts as a bustling profit center.

But pure play grocery stores have a more complicated challenge.

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Unless they are massive corporate giants, many local grocers and markets must keep their brick-and-mortar businesses open and undercut competition to attract or maintain customers. 

But this is a thankless job. 

Most grocery stores run on razor-thin profit margins. Even during the best of times, supermarkets bring in between 1-3% profit margins, and many of their most popular draws, like produce, chicken, eggs, and milk, are loss leaders. 

This means that if grocery stores want to turn a profit, they must undercut everybody else and hope that the sheer volume of customers coming through their doors to shop will make up for those losses. 

Popular grocery store closing permanently

Unfortunately for smaller, independent grocers, a race to the bottom is nearly an impossible proposition.

That's because many corporate giants have negotiating power with suppliers, allowing them to bring prices down as much as possible without sacrificing too much profit. 

This makes it hard to go up against the likes of Kroger and Walmart, so local businesses suffer. 

And now, Robert's Food Center, a market-style grocery store located in Madison, Conn., is closing its doors permanently after four decades in business. 

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Similar to Trader Joe's, Robert's Food Center was known to the community as a place to get high-quality baked goods, prepared meals, and local or artisanal products not typically offered by larger chains.

Robert's Food Center had been in an ongoing lease negotiation dispute with its landlord, North Madison Associates. After months of unsuccessful negotiations and maintenance issues, owner Zach Fusco made the hard decision to shutter the store. 

“After months of contentious negotiations with the landlord, we were unable to reach an agreement on outstanding maintenance issues on the leased structure, which was causing major operational issues for the store,” Fusco told Progressive Grocer. 

“We worked extremely hard to come to an amicable agreement with the landlord but were unable to do so. I am...extremely sad to be closing a store with a 42-year family legacy. We look forward to continuing to operate the Brookside Market location [in nearby Glastonbury] and work toward another location in the hopefully not so distant future.”