By Doug Curlee | Editor at Large

Area grocery stores vacant, shuttered or replaced

San Diego’s topsy-turvy supermarket picture hasn’t really settled down yet, and may not for a while.

All over San Diego County, there are buildings that used to hold markets sitting vacant, and many of them don’t hold out much hope of returning as food stores.

We’ve reported often about the now-vacant Albertson’s at Waring Road and Zion Avenue in Allied Gardens. The shopping center’s manager Linda Lasher doesn’t hold out immediate hope for a new grocery tenant anytime soon, if at all.

“I assume there are talks going on, but I don’t know for sure,” Lasher said. That’s more pessimistic than she has been in the past, when she said that “talks were going on, and we might be close with one or two interested parties.”

Even the weekly farmer’s market that had set up in the parking lot of the Albertson’s has shut its booths due to poor attendance and sales.

Allied Gardens Farmers Market manager Diem Do conducted an informal survey on social media site Nextdoor to determine what customers wanted most from the Friday markets to determine how and whether to move forward.

“And while the overwhelming majority said their top priority was fresh local produce, the sales didn’t show that,” she said. “What began with 20 farmers dwindled to a handful.”

Do said she and partner David Klaman are still unsure whether to move forward with the market, but it is clear that it will not return to the parking lot on Waring Road and Zion Avenue.

“The property management company for the Albertson’s lot wanted us to put up a large deposit, which we didn’t feel like we could justify with the low turnout,” Do said.

Things are a little more mysterious at the San Carlos Plaza Center at Navajo Road and Lake Murray Boulevard, just off the state Route 125 freeway.

There is a now-closed Fresh & Easy location in that center, since Fresh & Easy has disappeared from the American market scene altogether. The British-owned chain never established a foothold in California’s food market scene.

But what might, or might not, happen to that former store is shrouded in mystery.

The western half of that center is in the process of being demolished to make room for an Orchard Supply Hardware home improvement center. The demolition foreman says Orchard is sort of an upscale Home Depot or Lowe’s. It’s obvious the abandoned Fresh & Easy is, so far at least, being carefully protected from any damage being done to it by the demolition.

If there is an additional business slated to move in there or if the Fresh & Easy building will also be part of the OSH store, no one is able, or willing, to say. Rita Wagner of Athena Property Management in Irvine, which manages the San Carlos Plaza, would say only that “the site is under lease, and I can tell you nothing else about it.”

All efforts to gain more information were politely turned aside.

Three employees of other businesses in the plaza say they were told not to talk about anything they might have heard, and refused to let us use their names. They did tell three different stories, none of which sounded plausible.

We’ll keep an eye on it.

Editor Jeff Clemetson contributed to this report.

—Doug Curlee is Editor at Large. Reach him at [email protected].