New Market Getting Closer
added 10/01/08
by Terry Appleby
Co-op General Manager
You’ve waited a long time and so have we, and soon the Community Market will be opening. As I write this note in mid-July, a construction crew is busily working to erect the walls of the new Lyme Road Co-op Market. By the time you read this, the final look of the building should be pretty apparent.
For the past few weeks, anyone passing by the site has seen the footprint of the building outlined in concrete. When visiting the site during that time, I thought that the hole in the ground looked pretty small for a building of over five thousand square feet. I visited it again today, and the change is amazing. For the first time, the feel of the finished building was revealed. I still have to imagine what it will look like with windows and equipment and shoppers, but it was very exciting to see the change.
Right now we are targeting an opening date of mid November. We hope to have a couple of weeks of sales under our belts before the holidays. Usually we would not want to open that close to our busy season, but this will be a different kind of store opening under somewhat different circumstances than when we opened the Lebanon store eleven years ago. For one, the entire crew of the old store will be returning, so we’ll have lots of experience to lean on. Granted, they will have plenty of new systems to learn and the store will be much bigger, but the folks working there have been a team for some time now and are used to doing what it takes to make the store run well with a high level of service. Secondly, the store will not be as complex as the larger Hanover or Lebanon stores. While we plan on having a wide range of products in a smaller store, we’ll not have the full product lines of the other two.
As anyone who has been following the development of this project will recall, we have put significant amounts of environmentally sustainable features into this building. A major decision was to incorporate a geo-thermal system into the mechanical system of the store. That system will transfer heat from groundwater to help cool and heat the building, reducing energy consumption and corresponding emissions compared to more traditional systems. The geo-thermal system has a higher price tag than conventional systems, primarily due to the costs of drilling wells to access groundwater. The payback time (or the time its takes to pay back the difference between the added costs of the system with the savings from lower energy use) was substantially lowered in the last several months by the rising costs of energy. From the time last year when we made the decision to purchase the geothermal system until today, the cost of electricity has soared. Our electricity provider informed the Co-op just last week that rates would rise another 16 to 18 percent as of August 1. So the geo-thermal payback gets dramatically shorter, and the cost benefits will keep appreciating for the next 30 years.
Other green features of the building include a tight building envelope, a rain garden to capture excess water from the roof, energy efficient refrigeration, skylights, and features to encourage biking and use of mass transportation to the store.
Things are really starting to move on the Lyme Road. I hope you’ll come in and have a look soon!
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