It will come down to how corrupt a government is vs. how willing it is to get in there and get stuff done. The WA government has just finished building 72km of rail lines, two tunnels under the river, several train stations and a whole workshop to build trains in ~7 years. As a project, building 200 supermarkets would be similar in scale. Wollies recently bought a property not far from me, knocked it down and replaced it with a store in less than two years. So on an individual level, we’d see stores coming online in 2-3 years, and the rollout finishing in under 10. The government can make stores fairly identical.
If the government told Colesworth “Hey, nice thing you have going there - we’ll take it.”, they are of course going to fight that tooth-and-nail. Even assuming you managed to get the legislation to pass (that in itself would face massive resistance from the business community), you can’t just buy the stores themselves. You need to them for the lost revenue, costs to replace their lost stores and you’d be buying stores of different sizes/shapes/state of upkeep. These legal proceedings would drag out for years - and I think Colesworth would have a decent chance of either winning, or forcing the Government to pay more money than just building stores would have cost. Once the government got its hands on these ex-Colesworth stores, they would not all be standard. They would have different layouts, different building ages/states of upkeep. Fitout and maintenance would be a far bigger problem to solve than if the stores were purpose-built new.
I would be building too but not a carbon copy of commercial supermarkets which are expensive to build and designed to make you buy a lot of rubbish.
If we’re going to dream, I’d build an alternative structure from the ground up. It’d be a warehouse type affair built from top-quality Australian pre-fabricated components. Would cut down building time and provide manufacturing employment. It could still be architecturally attractive.
The location would be in a more industrial area as long as there was parking. This would also cut costs.
The interior design would not have to be a gigantic overlit, bels & whistles, overstocked supermarket. A bit more like Aldi, not fancy but still easy on the eye. Would also cut costs.
It would carry all essentials emphasising nutritious food.
I’d love for something like this to become a reality.
It will come down to how corrupt a government is vs. how willing it is to get in there and get stuff done. The WA government has just finished building 72km of rail lines, two tunnels under the river, several train stations and a whole workshop to build trains in ~7 years. As a project, building 200 supermarkets would be similar in scale. Wollies recently bought a property not far from me, knocked it down and replaced it with a store in less than two years. So on an individual level, we’d see stores coming online in 2-3 years, and the rollout finishing in under 10. The government can make stores fairly identical.
If the government told Colesworth “Hey, nice thing you have going there - we’ll take it.”, they are of course going to fight that tooth-and-nail. Even assuming you managed to get the legislation to pass (that in itself would face massive resistance from the business community), you can’t just buy the stores themselves. You need to them for the lost revenue, costs to replace their lost stores and you’d be buying stores of different sizes/shapes/state of upkeep. These legal proceedings would drag out for years - and I think Colesworth would have a decent chance of either winning, or forcing the Government to pay more money than just building stores would have cost. Once the government got its hands on these ex-Colesworth stores, they would not all be standard. They would have different layouts, different building ages/states of upkeep. Fitout and maintenance would be a far bigger problem to solve than if the stores were purpose-built new.
I would be building too but not a carbon copy of commercial supermarkets which are expensive to build and designed to make you buy a lot of rubbish.
If we’re going to dream, I’d build an alternative structure from the ground up. It’d be a warehouse type affair built from top-quality Australian pre-fabricated components. Would cut down building time and provide manufacturing employment. It could still be architecturally attractive.
The location would be in a more industrial area as long as there was parking. This would also cut costs.
The interior design would not have to be a gigantic overlit, bels & whistles, overstocked supermarket. A bit more like Aldi, not fancy but still easy on the eye. Would also cut costs.
It would carry all essentials emphasising nutritious food.
I’d love for something like this to become a reality.