Fresh Easy Neighborhood Market

Fresh isn't turning out to be all that easy. With much fanfare, British retailer Tesco this fall billed its Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market chain of small grocery stores as a fresher, more convenient alternative to large supermarkets when it opened its first stores in Southern California. Nearly six months later, it looks as though many shoppers aren't buying it. The chain remains optimistic but says it is suspending the opening of U.S. stores for three months.

When the British owner of Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market stores launched the chain in Southern California last year, shoppers immediately started comparing it to Trader Joe's, a company that has long dominated the local small grocery store scene. Beginning today they will go head-to-head in Manhattan Beach.

A new chain of mid-size grocery stores -- each about the size of a Trader Joe's -- is quietly being readied for a full-scale assault this fall on Southern California. With little fanfare so far, Tesco, Britain's largest retailer, is spending as much as $2 billion to launch Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, starting in the Southland, Las Vegas and Phoenix. Tesco, with more than $80 billion in annual sales, already operates in 13 countries and has about 370,000 employees.

FOR DECADES, IT has been next to impossible to put affordable, healthy meals on the table in neighborhoods such as South Los Angeles. There are fast-food joints, to be sure, and a few expensive, poorly stocked corner groceries. But supermarkets are scarce -- less than one for every 100,000 people, compared with nearly five for every 100,000 on the Westside.

Britain's largest retailer may not find much of a welcome mat Thursday when it opens its first stores in Southern California. The first six of what could become hundreds of Tesco's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets face a rocky reception in the Southland. Community organizations plan to protest the lack of stores in poor neighborhoods. A labor-oriented group says it will distribute leaflets discouraging shoppers.

Maybe Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market can compete after all. Parking lots were full and cash-register lines long at the six stores that British grocery giant Tesco opened in Southern California on Thursday. Some people showed up two hours before front doors were unlocked. In Anaheim, hecklers interrupted a ribbon-cutting ceremony. "Just open the store and let us in," one impatient shopper shouted. "We've been waiting 30 years for this."

The British owner of the new Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market grocery chain had to contend with uninvited guests Monday, when about 100 activists from a coalition of community groups protested outside a meeting with investors. Tesco, Fresh & Easy's parent company, had hosted U.S. and British institutional investors and money managers at a Santa Monica hotel to update them on plans for the chain, which began opening stores in Southern California this month.