| East Bay Express July 18, 2001 Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 By Jennifer Barrios Joanne Brion of Brion and Associates is doing the study, which will be completed in February. "We're really looking at what the retail strengths are in Berkeley," she explains. "How can we strengthen what we have? Berkeley doesn't want to be Emeryville, and it's going to continue to be an issue. People are going to want to shop [in Emeryville], you can't change that. So what we can do is make people aware of what's available here." So how worried should the East Bay's small local merchants be as Emeryville's new shopping core continues to develop? The answer, even at this relatively late stage in the game, is still not clear. Louis Bucklin is a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and the editor of the academic Journal of Retailing. "Studies have indicated that where retailers are innovative, they can often survive these things," Bucklin says. While in isolated rural areas the arrival of a large retailer like Wal-Mart often means a quick death for small stores, in a thriving urban area like the East Bay, retailers can survive if they study the enemy and then change to complement it rather than compete with it. It's not a new question, Bucklin points out. "I liken it to the problems that smaller retailers have faced for the last 75 years since supermarkets and variety stores started emerging," he says. "And that was back in the first quarter of the last century. When the first department stores came in on the East Coast, you had small-scale merchants saying, 'This is terrible, the sky is falling in!' But if you look at the incidence of small stores, you still see a lot. We're not a nation of small stores as we were a hundred years ago, but nevertheless, there are still large numbers of small stores who have found niches in the market." The IKEA Group must be pleased with the way their comparatively small East Bay store has been doing, because they are moving forward with plans to build two additional IKEA stores in the area. Ground will be broken for an IKEA store in East Palo Alto next year, and the IKEA Group has just purchased 24 acres of land near Pleasanton for a new store even larger than IKEA East Bay. That, O'Rourke says, will relieve the pressure on the already overburdened Emeryville location. It will, of course, also cut off the traffic from the far north and south that currently goes to the Emeryville store. But even that doesn't worry Patrick Galvin. "It isn't a zero-sum game, where IKEA's gain is everyone else's loss," he says. "We have more of a zero-sum game with the automobile industry. I would prefer people to spend more on their homes than on their cars." "I'll tell you," Galvin adds. "Our Redwood City store is going to be about three miles away from their store. If I were to open a third store, I'd open it in Pleasanton."Who could possibly pose a competitive challenge to a 275,000-square-foot store that is attracting tens of thousands of customers a week? A group of small Berkeley furniture store owners believe they can. | ||
