Place: Tasty Tacos
Lunch: Original flour taco (extra meat), steak enchilada, Mug root beer
Tasty Tacos is a family-owned local favorite fast food Mexican chain with one of the more unique menus to the format. Their signature item is the "Original Flour" taco, which is a fried flatbread (think Taco Bell's Chalupa or Taco Bueno's Muchaco) full of meat (or chicken or steak or pork or beans if you're a weirdo), cheese, and lettuce. Get one with extra meat (or chicken or steak or pork or beans if you're a weirdo), and it's pretty much all you need. It's a little weird in that their meat has pinto beans mixed in, but they're great. And you can side them with all sorts of different things. They have a selection of deep fried options that rivals most state fairs. Want a taco and an order of deep fried mushrooms? This is your place.
Speaking of local favorites, a local supermarket brand is being put to pasture next week as the last Dahl's stores are converted to the Kansas City-based "Price Chopper" brand.
W.T. Dahl's first market opened in 1931. The first supermarket format store opened in 1948, a location that operates to this day (though looking nothing like it did back then due to remodels and odd expansions to fit the footprint of the lot). Dahl's was an early pioneer of in-store bakeries, lunch counters, and curbside grocery pick-up. Dahl's holds claim to being the world's first supermarket to accept debit cards as payment for groceries.
Dahl's was one of many local stores distributed by Supervalu when I moved here twenty-plus years ago. There were a number of independent local names Supervalu sold to, many operating out of old Safeway buildings. Tait's. Randall's. Dillow's. Supervalu's presence was such that they had a major distribution center in town. Nash-Finch distributed to a few stores as well. Easter's locally, and econofoods in neighboring areas. They all gradually fell by the wayside as Walmart and Target got into the grocery business, discounter Aldi entered the market, and local behemoth Hy-Vee built bigger and better stores with more services, and Supervalu's distribution center fell with them.
Completely employee-owned by 1970, Dahl's had the appearance of being healthy, seemingly poising itself for the future with store remodels and newer, bigger locations in recent years. But there was talk they were positioning themselves for a sale in the early 2000's, with Albertson's and Kroger being mentioned suitors. (Albertson's did enter the market briefly through another acquisition.)
So what happened? Bad decisions, probably. Clearly too much capital spending. The first sign of problems came last year when the thirteen-store chain closed their two newest stores, both open just a few years. Around that time it was revealed that Dahl's had switched distribution to Kansas City-based Associated Wholesale Grocers, who had also purchased some of the Dahl's properties in leaseback deals to give Dahl's operating capital.
The writing was on the wall, and Dahl's hit that wall pretty quickly. A third store closure came a couple months later. In November, Dahl's filed for bankruptcy. The eventual fallout resulted in three more store closures and seven stores going to Associated, who declared five would be rebranded as Price Choppers, their flagship brand, and two as Cashsaver, a low-price format where marked prices are calculated based on the wholesaler cost plus the cost to deliver the food to the location. Then you pay ten percent above the marked price at the register. That's...weird.
My local Dahl's store when I moved here was their second supermarket location on Ingersoll Ave, a store nicknamed "IngerDahl's" by the locals. It had an unusual property layout. It had entrances on the north and south ends of the west side of the building. If you walked in one and out the other, you walked down the exit side of the cash registers on one side and the customer service and lunch counter space (two U-shaped counters, REALLY cool) on the other. There were separate parking lots on either side. Dahl's replaced this store with a new one built on the north parking lot footprint a few years back, about the time I moved out of the neighborhood. I've been in that store a couple of times and am baffled by what exactly they think they gained with the new store. Space? Yeah, okay. But the charm was gone. Still, that inner-city location was probably Dahl's best performer. The locals will probably continue to refer to the store as "IngerDahl's", though it would be awesome if they called it "IngerChop", and Price Chopper staffed it with ninjas.
The thing that was nice about Dahl's is that it was the one place in town that felt like a proper modern supermarket. They had very nice interior packages with a regular supermarket layout, whereas Hy-Vee has gone into an obnoxious direction with more and more space devoted to a food court and even full-service restaurant format and a big focus on prepared foods. Price Chopper stores operate closer to what Dahl's does than Hy-Vee, but you can see them evolving in Hy-Vee's direction.
(I'm not going to put Fareway in this argument because they're a whole different animal. A very wonderful animal I love dearly, but they're truly one-of-a-kind in the industry anymore.)
I guess we'll see how Price Chopper does. They're the biggest grocer in Kansas City, but locals in any market tend to be very fickle when it comes to grocery brands. But being as close as they are to here, and Kansas City being a popular shopping and sports team destination for locals, perhaps that makes them familiar enough to get their footing.
