Downtown Athens, Georgia, has seemingly everything: art and music, quirky shops and a world-class food scene.
What it didn’t have until a year ago was a grocery store.
Saajan Patel (BBA ’20) envisioned Prince Market, which opened in 2023 near the corner of Prince Avenue and Pulaski Street, as the everyday grocery store for the thousands of people who moved into nine new apartment complexes built downtown over the last decade.
“Before we went into it, we did a lot of research and we found this area was already considered a food desert by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” says Patel, who majored in finance at Terry but grew up working in his family’s network of retail shops and motels. “We wanted to build something the community needed and were very excited about the possibilities. There’s nothing really like this near here.”
As Americans put off starting large families and change the way they think about their neighborhoods and shopping, micro-markets — local grocery stores between 2,000 and 3,000 square feet — are disrupting larger grocery retail models, according to a recent white paper by Deloitte.
Marketing research shows shoppers increasingly favor products reflecting their identity and perceived as more authentic, says Sarah Whitley, an assistant professor of marketing at Terry who studies customer emotions. It makes sense, then, that they would flock to a bespoke grocery store catering to their needs.
“There is a push to focus on the customer experience,” Whitley says. “One way you could think about this is the creation of smaller stores where people feel more catered to and it’s more interactive. … That’s in response to people doing so much shopping online because if you’re going to get people out of their homes and into a store, you’re going to have to give them something a little extra.”
While the locally focused grocery concept Patel and his family wanted to launch is becoming more popular, it’s still uncommon in the Southeast.
When a space in the mixed-use development at 100 Prince Avenue opened, Patel leaned into the connections and confidence he gained at Terry to help make the store a reality.
He says lessons about time management and leadership were the most effective.
“Terry was great,” says Patel, who manages part of his family’s network of motels in addition to getting Prince Market on solid ground. “I was a little scared going in, but you just have to be on top of your scheduling and the management of your time. … I learned a lot about staying on top of what needed to be done. It helped prepare me for my working life and as we launched this store.”
Patel tapped a classmate, risk management and insurance graduate Ryan Vetter (BBA ’20), to help get the store off the ground. Now that it’s up and running, Patel’s younger brother, Yash, runs the day-to-day operations.
When planning began, the team knew it wanted Prince Market to have a sandwich shop, coffee bar and ice cream counter — but it also needed to be a real grocery store.
The challenge was to stock everything customers might need to make a quick dinner and do a load of laundry, but not make it so big that shoppers got overwhelmed or it lost its identity, says Patel. To that end, they sell Georgia-made specialties such as cheese straws, pecans and locally-grown produce to strengthen that community bond.
“We’ve been in Athens for 20 years,” Patel says. “I went to school here. I live near downtown. Athens is my town, and this store is for the people of Athens. When you go to the store, the employees ask, ‘What were you looking for that you didn’t find?’ We want to do our best to make the store part of the downtown community.”