Gainesville residents will have another choice for grocery shopping this December.
Save-A-Lot, a discount grocery store, is set to open mid-December at 2302 SE Hawthorne Road in the building where a Food Lion store closed in February.
Save-A-Lot, based in St. Louis, has more than 1,300 stores in 39 states. Save-A-Lot spokeswoman Chon Tomlin said the average shopper can save up to 40 percent on their groceries as compared to a traditional grocery store.
“It’s a real easy way to save money and stretch that student budget,” Tomlin said.
Tomlin said the store model will be smaller than the former Food Lion store. The average Save-A-Lot store is 15,000 to 16,000 square feet, about a third of the size of a traditional grocery store, she said.
Tomlin said the average store employs 20 to 25 people, and the majority work part-time. She said the store is open to hiring students.
Tomlin said that while many students look at a job at a grocery store as a temporary paycheck, students should look at Save-A-Lot as a potential career path.
The new store will be about four miles away from the Reitz Union, which might be an inconvenience to student shoppers on a budget, said Mark Rush, UF microeconomics professor.
“Students are interested in saving a lot,” Rush said. “But students won’t go very much because it’s far away.”
However, he said the store’s cheap goods will fit Gainesville’s Eastside because of the number of low-income residents who live there.
“It’s appealing to residents in east Gainesville because they’re vastly underserved,” Rush said.
Mugdha Palkar, a 26-year-old UF information systems graduate student, is interested in seeing what kind of food Save-A-Lot has, as long as she can get there.
“If the bus goes there, then I will go there,” Palkar said.
Marissa Langford, an 18-year-old UF health science freshman, said she learned through her mother how to coupon, and she wants to see if she can get a good deal on fruits and vegetables at the new Save-A-Lot.
“I like discounts, but I’ve never been there,” she said, “so it’d be good for me to check it out.”
