Do you think this would work in Downtown Detroit? yes or no? and why?

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...r-urban-store#

Meijer deploys urban strategy with trial run of smaller urban store

By Nathan Skid
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Courtesy Meijer Inc. Rendering of Meijer Inc.'s planned store in Melrose Park, Ill.
With a planned Aug. 25 opening of a pilot store in the Chicago area, Grand Rapids-based Meijer Inc. has embarked on an urban growth path that other national retailers are exploring.
Meijer announced this week that it will open Meijer Marketplace, a smaller version of its supercenter store, near Chicago area in hopes that it will become a successful format for urban development.
Robert Gibbs, managing principal of Birmingham-based Gibbs Planning Group and instructor of an urban retail course at Harvard University, said smaller formats for big-box food and retail companies is a trend being seen across the country.
"Publicly traded retailers need to show growth," Gibbs said. "Across the country, they are no longer going to the edge of suburban areas to wait for farms to become subdivisions. They're going into the cities and opening smaller stores in historic buildings."

Erik Unger, Crain's Chicago Business Photo taken in February of shopping center in Melrose Park, Ill., where Meijer Inc.'s new store is slated to open Aug. 25. Meijer's 96,000-square-foot, mini-supercenter is about half the size of an average Meijer store but will have most of the same departments as a full-size Meijer, including groceries, electronics, seasonal items, toys, sporting goods and a pet department.
Frank Guglielmi, director of public relations for Meijer, would not disclose the build-out cost of Meijer Marketplace but said the average cost of a supercenter is about $15 million.
Guglielmi said the new small-store format is a prototype for other urban areas and downtowns across the nation. The populous Chicago suburbs are a ripe proving ground for the concept, he said, and if successful, the company could build more stores in the near future, including in Michigan.
"Potentially down the road, we could bring this type of store to other urban markets," Guglielmi said. "The bottom line is, you can't take a 200,000-square-foot box and put it in a densely populated neighborhood. This gives us another option."
Neil Stern, senior partner at McMillan and Doolittle LLP, a Chicago-based retail consulting firm, said major retailers nationwide are looking at urban areas for growth because suburbia has become oversaturated.
"They are running out of room in traditional suburban markets," Stern said. "As retailers were building big-box stores in suburbia, they were ignoring urban areas because the real estate wasn't there or they were too hard to develop."
But Stern said that sentiment is changing as major retailers like Best Buy Co., Home Depot Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are developing smaller stores to fit into cities.
"Urban areas are one of the last frontiers for them," Stern said. "But the thing about urban areas is they are hardly homogeneous. You have tremendous variations in income and ethnicity, but they are generally underserved."
Gibbs pointed to Bentonville-based Wal-Mart's 18,000-square-foot format as an example of the urban trend, with the company looking for ways to grow into urban areas that can't handle the size of a typical store, which can range from 50,000 to 200,000 square feet.
"Best Buy has gone with a half-size format, as have Office Max, Office Depot, Staples, H&M," he said. "They have to grow because they are public companies, and the best place to do that is in the urban areas."
Daniel Duggan contributed to this story.