Lucky's Market — Attraction in Fort Collins

Disappointed over Whole Foods' recent decision to cut health benefits to its part-time employees, I decided to try Lucky's Market on the northwest corner of the College Avenue/Mulberry intersection. What a pleasant surprise! Lucky's has an intimate, local feel to it. A bagger greeted me with a genuine smile and greeting when I came in. At about 3:30pm, the store was full of light, clean, all end caps and major displays refreshed, no trash laying around out front, plenty of parking close in. Lots of positive messaging, colorful signage. My mission: butter, olive oil and a vegetable for dinner. Price tags were easy to read. Simple Truth organic butter was $5.29, a big bottle of their extra virgin olive oil was on sale for $6.99, and I found non-organic asparagus for $3.99, which I thought was high, but tolerable. (The organic asparagus was almost 2X that and looked coarse.) The produce department was full of color, full of choices, fresh, shiny and crisp-looking. I tried to walk by the appetizing dessert area, but it captured me in the form of bite-sized brownies for $2.99. My BYOBag earned a discount or a wooden token to put in a "coin-drop" for one of three charities. I chose the token, which was fun. Next time I'll check out the "Apothecary" and meat department. I've heard that Lucky's is expensive, but my sense is that if you shop their sales, they could be affordable. Besides the nice bagger, the rest of the staff all seemed to be in a good mood, too, making it a fun half hour. Be sure to approach the store heading south on College Avenue or west on Mulberry. All other approaches are awkward and difficult during...

So this place would be 2 stars, but the location is awesome. Speaking as someone who lives in the old town area I can say that it's really unfortunate that there isn't really a supermarket within walking distance. The options are to go all the way down to Walmart or to pay a lot of money at 7-Eleven or the Food Co-op. Well, this place offers you the ability to walk to the grocery store now. The downside though is that it's effectively a slightly more expensive Whole Foods with much fewer options. I can't really blame it on them they did really well pack a lot of stuff into the building they're in. But is only so much you can do with a building that size. As the price I've heard a lot of people talking about the "Whole Foods but without the price" shpeal, but really looking around inside there it seems to be light out identically to Whole Foods, and things cost about what they used to charge at Whole Foods before Amazon bought them and made stuff cheaper. So all-in-all this place is a bad grocery store, but it does have one really awesome thing going for it it's in a location which for whatever reason doesn't really have another grocery store within walking distance. So I think they'll do okay but honestly even if you're into organic food just drive to Whole Foods for your main food supply. But if you're just looking for like a meal or something or you just need a gallon of milk, or some ingredient feel free to go here, this is a fine place for walking distance even if it should be nobody's main grocery store. So 3/5 a net...

It's a nice option for those living/working in Old Town, but there's no real reason to go out of your way to go there. It's another Whole Foods/Sprouts-esque place, rather a poor imitation of them actually. But with the high markups and emphasis on the expensive hipster stuff. They had a few specific items that I used to find in the larger metro areas that I hadn't found here before, which was nice to rediscover. But is it worth a drive all the way there from south FoCo, and navigating the badly-set up parking lot and the stopped traffic clogging the corner from yet another train running through town? Not so much. Also the store itself is badly and inefficiently set-up, there's no good flow and the aisles are very narrow. Not enough check out lanes open for the lunch hour, the paper bags are flimsy (one guy broke his right in front of me as he was trying to leave, made quite a mess, I double-bagged mine then...), and the holder for the shopping basket on the check out lanes is only half as long as the basket so you have to worry about it falling and dropping too. It's, what can I say, a gentrified sporting...