Politics & Government
6:00am: Thur March 7: Jewel-Osco Opens at 6014 S. Cottage Grove
And UChicago Hopes to Sign a Lease This Month for the Treasure Island Space ... Is Amazon Next?
A three-story set of grocery-store-news has arrived in Hyde Park and Woodlawn this week:
1. At 6:00am the day after tomorrow Thursday March 7th, Jewel-Osco at 6014 S. Cottage Grove will open its doors for the first time. A Grand Opening ceremony is listed for 10:00am, later that morning.
2. The vacant/former Treasure Island Foods store in the Hyde Park Shopping Center is "hoped" to have a lease executed between the landlord University of Chicago, and a full-service supermarket for that 50,000 square-foot space, by the end of this month of March. There is no clue as to the final identity of the grocery store that will sign this lease with the Universitty.
3. A few days ago, Amazon announced that it will be opening a set of Amazon grocery stores throughout the nation, including in Chicago, that will be separate from their Whole Foods Stores. Will Amazon open a store in Hyde Park? Will these new stores have 100% automated checkout? Only time will tell.
Find out what's happening in Hyde Parkfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
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Social media is abuzz with a large number of quite excited Hyde Park residents envisioning the "light at the end of the tunnel" and end of their five-months of time without one full-service grocery store within walking distance of their homes -- particulary for the carless and the elderly and the disabled residents near 55th Street.
Find out what's happening in Hyde Parkfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
One vigorous set of comments is a quite stark division between those who prefer the Treasure Island 'model' of all-human checkout lanes ... and those who want at least half of the lanes (or more) to be "self-checkout" lanes. Only time will tell what happens in Jewel and other new grocery stores, and which people prefer and winds up with the majority of lanes.
For the HP Shopping Center grocery store, although a lease-agreement may be announced by the end of March, the actual opening of the store may not happen until about July, August, or September.
Amazon's announcement was only a few days ago, so actual plans for actual locations, are not yet to be seen ... but should appear in the coming few months.