HIGH-END, HIGH-RISK

A bottle of Chateau Latour Bordeaux at the new Publix GreenWise Market, tucked into a glass cabinet where the high-end wines are displayed, is so pricey you might be afraid to pick it up.

At $800 a bottle, it's not typical of the wines at GreenWise - there are many more reasonably priced wines on the shelves - but it shows some of the high ambition at the new store, which opened Thursday at 2403 W. Azeele St. in Tampa. By opening the high-end GreenWise natural and organic food store, Publix Super Markets is targeting Bay area foodies at a risky time as the economy turns downward.

Nationwide, retailers are reporting some of the lowest sales figures they have seen in decades, and shoppers generally are trading down from brand-name and gourmet groceries. Plus, it's still not clear that the Tampa Bay area is fertile ground for high-end natural food superstores.

For years, industry giants Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats Markets, now owned by Whole Foods, held off on building a store in the Bay area (Wild Oats finally opened a Tampa store in 2006). Analysts said it was because the companies worried that the Bay area lacked a big population of affluent and highly-educated shoppers, the kind who make up the stores' core customers.

Nonetheless, Karen Marino, a shopper from Chicago who is visiting her daughter in Tampa, said GreenWise should compete well against Whole Foods Market, which took over the former Wild Oats store on Dale Mabry Highway.

"If they can maintain their prices, they're going to knock Whole Foods out of the box," said Marino, who said she thinks GreenWise was significantly lower priced than Whole Foods.

From the moment they drive up, shoppers will notice a big change from their usual trips to the supermarket. For starters, Publix apparently was so eager to be in Tampa's Hyde Park neighborhood - where parking is tight - that the company built two parking decks above the 39,000-square-foot store. Customers can take escalators down to the store or take a cargo elevator if they have carts.

Publix wouldn't say how much it spent on the new store, but public records give some clues. The company paid $3.5 million for the land, according to county land records. And, the store's builder, Tampa-based R.R. Simmons Construction, took out a $12.1 million "surety bond" on the project, according to clerk of court records. A surety bond essentially ensures that a construction project will be finished. It suggests the store's development costs may have been somewhere around that figure.

As pricey as that sounds, it might be less than Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods spends on its stores, which also target affluent customers. Whole Foods' total development and opening costs can run $15 million a store, said Andrew Wolf, a retail analyst with investment banking firm BB&T Capital Markets. By comparison, a large, traditional supermarket will run $8 million to $10 million, Wolf said.

To pay for such high overhead, Publix has devoted a big portion of the store, 4,500 square feet, to fresh prepared foods.

These tend to have higher prices and higher profit margins than many of the groceries along the store's aisles. For example, this week GreenWise Market was serving up such prepared dishes as teriyaki burgers for $8.29 and chicken wraps for $6.99. Other pricey gourmet items on display this week included Japanese Kobe beef, which sold for $41.99 a pound.

Not everything is so expensive, of course. While it is primarily a natural and organic food store, GreenWise has a big selection of conventional groceries that retail for the same price they do at a traditional Publix store.

Throughout the industry, natural and organic groceries will cost shoppers 10 percent to 20 percent more than equivalent non-natural and non-organic groceries, said Jay Jacobowitz, a natural food industry consultant with the firm Retail Insights.

This week, the new GreenWise Market, its first in the Bay area, was slammed with customers trying it on for size. However, after the opening buzz dies down, the store will have to overcome a very difficult economy for high-end retailers.

Whole Foods Market reported this week that its sales are down sharply. Its sales at stores open for at least a year, or "comparable store sales," grew just 0.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared with growth of 8.2 percent in the same quarter last year.

Jacobowitz said shoppers who are committed to natural and organic foods aren't likely to change their shopping habits much during the current economy. Customers who are new to natural foods, however, may choose to cheaper, conventional groceries, he said.

"Instead of opting for an N.Y. strip they would get hamburger," Jacobowitz said of many customers. "And they might substitute some local produce for some organic produce that is not local."