Listen up fans of Pirate's Booty and Charles Shaw, Trader Joe's may be in the process of a downtown expansion. The grocery store chain reportedly has its eyes on a spot at 4th Street just off Market, and has made official moves to determine what city permits would be required to open up such a store.
So reports Hoodline, which notes that the address of 10 4th Street listed in the requested project review corresponds to the vacant storefront pictured above. The publication reached out to Trader Joe's, who has not returned their requests for detail.
The downtown storefront, should it ever become a Trader Joe's, would likely compete with the Whole Foods down the street on 4th just shy of Harrison.
San Francisco, it seems, may be hungry for another TJ's. In fact, just last summer the 200-page Castro Retail Strategy report specifically recommended that the Southern California-based chain move into the neighborhood. This recommendation was in spite of the fact that the company had already spiked plans to move to the Castro in 2011.
The potential new 4th Street location, downtown and in area that is particularly hard for private automobile traffic to negotiate, would perhaps mark a departure for the company that has highlighted the importance of easy car access for their business. When the grocery store backed out of plans to open the Castro location way back when, Supervisor Wiener highlighted this very point.
"After two years of on-again-off-again consideration of the site," wrote the Supervisor on Facebook, "Trader Joe's decided that the location was not going to work for its business model, one that is fairly reliant on automobile visits."
So has Trader Joe's as a whole become less reliant on car-driving customers, or would a potential 4th Street store represent some new kind of TJ's that is designed with the pedestrian in mind (think TargetExpress). Either way, if it sells cheap wine, we're sure it will do just fine.
