Residents say store featuring fresh, nutritious foods ‘couldn’t come soon enough’
Scores of shoppers who waited for more than an hour outside the new Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market Feb. 7 fill the aisles once the store opened its doors to the public for the first time. —Compton Bulletin photo by Allison Jean Eaton
By Allison Jean Eaton
Bulletin Staff Writer
COMPTON – The city’s new Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market opened its doors last Thursday to a throng of eager shoppers, most of them from the surrounding neighborhood, and a member of the British Royal Family.
His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, Duke of York kicked off a U.S. visit with a stop at the new location off the intersection of Central and Rosecrans avenues, the latest in a rash of stores the U.S. arm of British retailer Tesco is opening in California, Arizona and Nevada.
The prince is currently touring British business ventures in the United States in his capacity as the United Kingdom’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment.
“If I was going to want to shop on a regular basis, I’d rather come to a store this size,” said Prince Andrew after comparing large Tesco supermarkets he’s seen back home to Fresh & Easy’s smaller size and wider aisles.
Despite what Dr. Kofi Sefa-Boakye, the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency director, described as a “fast tracked” project, the store billing itself as a one-stop shop for fresh, nutritious and wholesome food products was a long time coming, according to some residents.
“It’s about time they opened a store like this here… I am so excited about this store being here. I could not wait – the day couldn’t come soon enough,” said Sharron Bryant, 48, who lives around the corner on 131st Street.
Bryant and several other women pushing shopping carts with cherry-picked selections took a little time out from shopping to comment on what a relief it is to finally have a store like Fresh & Easy in Compton.
“In these areas like this… people think we don’t eat healthy,” continued Bryant. “Well, we do. It’s just that the ones that do eat healthy go outside. We have to go far away to get to a Trader Joe’s or a Whole Foods or a Bristol Farms or something like that. But now we have it here locally, and it’s excellent,” she said.
And it means more sales tax revenue for the city, chimed in longtime resident Erma Clements, who lives six blocks from the new market. She and shopping companion Melanie Franks said they’re used to traveling all the way to Gardena, Manhattan Beach or El Segundo to access fresh and for the most part organic and preservative-free foods.
Sefa-Boakye said this new market is likely the fastest project he’s ever worked on in his years of community redevelopment experience, and it proves that Compton “is at the head of the pack in urban resurgence.”
“It was about October or September (of 2007) that we got the news” that the market chain had decided to locate here, he said. And now, just a little more than five months later, what was a vacant dirt lot littered with used tires has been transformed into a an eco-friendly structure that inside offers nutritious foods to an underserved population.
The entire northwest corner at Rosecrans and Central has been redeveloped over the past five years, Sefa-Boakye said. Just in front of Fresh & Easy sits Rite Aid, and next to that is Starbucks and T-Mobile. Prior to these developments, Sefa-Boakye said the area lay blighted and run down, an eyesore to the neighborhood.
The city “fast tracked” the project, speeding up the permitting and inspections process to get the store to residents as soon as possible and to give the city a competitive edge in attracting additional economic development.
Sefa-Boakye explained that if the city can offer companies the ability to get a project done from start to finish in a matter of months, Compton will become more attractive to prospective businesses interested in setting up shop in the southern Los Angeles area.
“The location they (Fresh & Easy) selected wouldn’t have been better,” said Sefa-Boakye. “Because this northwest quadrant, which includes Atkinson Brickyard, is one of the sleeping giants which eventually is going to transform the community of Compton.”
What’s more, the store rings true as a sign of urban revival here.
“Fresh & Easy is going to put Compton straight on the map,” he continued. “Why? Because urban communities are currently being realized as the best place to do business. And Compton is the ‘Comeback Kid’.”
Which hasn’t always been the case.
2nd District Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke said she’s struggled for years to get supermarkets and major grocery chains to open stores in her district, but to little avail.
“We’re so pleased to have this facility here – it makes such a difference. I know that everyone assumes that there is a grocery store in everyone’s neighborhood where you can get good produce and where you can get all the things you need to raise your family. Unfortunately, that is not always the case in my district,” said Burke. “Too often when people go into the grocery store, the produce is at its end of its shelf life, and you cannot get a full array of the kind of products you want.”
Mayor Eric J. Perrodin echoed Burke’s comments.
“This means so much to us here in the city of Compton,” he said. “We’ve been trying to get a full service supermarket that offers healthy food for so long here in the city of Compton.
“We had to get somebody from Great Britain to come over here before we could get our own Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, so thank you, Great Britain.”
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