The City Market co-op has hired a new general manager. John Tashiro, the interim CEO at 1% for the Planet, will replace Pat Burns, who announced his retirement earlier this year after seven years in the position.
Tashiro has also worked at the FairTrade Foundation and at Coca Cola, according to his LinkedIn profile.
“He was a standout candidate in terms of his leadership potential, his character and his track record in a variety of different settings,” said Rachel Jolly, who chairs the City Market board of directors. She said the search committee, which interviewed four finalists, was impressed with Tashiro’s background in retail sales and branding. Jolly also noted that he has experience managing a wide array of projects.
Tashiro, who could not immediately be reached for comment, has a bachelor’s degree in international business and economics from Sophia University in Japan.
He’ll take the reins of the grocery cooperative at an interesting time. City Market is thriving, and boasts $38 million in sales and roughly 10,000 members. It’s always had just a single store in downtown Burlington. Now the co-op, nearly half a century old, is hoping to open a second store in the South End. It is also considering opening a smaller, bodega-like store elsewhere.
Tashiro starts July 1.
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In what parallel universe is this news? A grocery store hires a new manager. Wow!
In what world is new leadership of a local enterprise with sales over $38 million a year not news? Wow.
I’m stunned by the fact that City Market does $38,000,000 in sales every year. That works out to $104,109 every day of the year. For one store. With terrible parking, in a terrible location, with terrible traffic, and no chain affiliation – each one with potential for disaster, according to the generally accepted wisdom of what it takes to thrive in the grocery store business.
Yet City Market not only thrives, they blow supermarkets out of the water. City Market has 12,000 SF with sales of $38 million = $3,167 in sales per SF per year. An average supermarket sells about $616 per SF per year (*). So City Market is selling over 5X what the average supermarket would in the same space. And they grew 6% last year.
Not only that, City Market actually returned $968,000, or 2.55% of sales, back to its members.
We need to start asking why other businesses don’t work this way.
(*) source link: http://www.fmi.org/research-resources/supe…
What is news to Leonard, another Kardashian story ? This is of course news and good news too. Hiring a CEO of a popular and successful local organization is an important topic to me. I do wish they would open up another location or two, in my case voting for New North End, where we could definitely use an alternative to Hannafords.