Wheaton Jewel to close within a month

The most anticipated piece of bad news in Wheaton will become a reality in just under a month.

The downtown Jewel Food Store on Willow Avenue will close forever on Feb. 21.

Mayor Mike Gresk made the announcement at a city council meeting just after the League of Voters at Wheaton North High School called on the council to keep the grocery store and restore its pharmacy.

Gresk said the loss of the Jewel was a "lingering death," but a "No. 1 topic" on the city council's agenda.

The city learned of the closure after meeting with Jewel officials last Friday. The following day, the city learned Jewel intends to sell the site.

That would be the first step in finding a replacement grocer. The city council approved a new law in 2007 that would block Jewel from only selling the land to a buyer who promised not to build a grocery store that would compete with the remaining two Jewel Food Stores in Wheaton.

That helps pave the way for a new grocer by keeping the site available. However, City Manager Don Rose said there's no way the site will be sold until Jewel and CVS come to an agreement on their co-ownership of the Willow Avenue store and more than a dozen other co-owned shops in the area.

That tug-of-war has waged between the two companies for nearly two years now. That means it may take longer to put a replacement grocer on Willow Avenue than city officials would like.

After the council meeting, both Gresk and Rose said they believed that, despite overtures from the city for several years, Jewel intended to close the store all along.

"You could just sense it by the condition of the store, both inside and outside," Gresk said. "In general, it was not in their plans."

Gresk said Jewel explained that the closure will happen because the store doesn't make enough money. It is the oldest and smallest establishment in the Jewel Food Store chain. As such, the 47-year-old store made solid profit for its size, but that only masked the general lack of overhead at the store.

Wheaton had offered to extend the Jewel site all the way out to where the Amoco gas station is off of Main Street. City officials also posed the idea of a multi-level grocery store. None of the ideas materialized as Jewel's parent company changed hands multiple times in the past few years.

City officials do not know the asking price for the Jewel site. However, Gresk said the starting point for any replacement grocer would involve an establishment with liquor sales and a pharmacy.