South Point Grocery coming to Silo Square in 2025!

Article written by Susan Ellis of the Memphis Business Journal.

“I hate big-box grocery stores. I hate shopping. I hate the experience of a big-box grocery store,” Brian Hill said.

Hill is the developer behind Southaven’s Silo Square. The development broke ground in 2018. It includes some 300 single-family homes, as well as a main commercial square that is punctuated by a bell tower and extends beyond the square along Getwell Road. A few of its draws are Central BBQ, Staks Kitchen, and Kyuramen.

Back in 2022, Hill told MBJ that he had a grocery store in the works. He is now ready to talk about it.

That store will be South Point at Silo Square from Memphis-based Castle Retail Group — the same company behind three Cash Saver stores, High Point Market, and South Point Grocery in the South Main District.

Hill said he spoke to a couple national grocery brands. But the issue there was that demographics needed to be met and, above all, a distribution infrastructure was necessary.

Here’s where a little serendipity came into play. As the finishing touches were being put on the South Point Grocery at 136 Webster Ave., a Castle Retail Group employee who lives in Southaven told Rick James, the CEO of Castle, that the site would be perfect for a new market.

Neighborhood grocery store

So, one Sunday, James and his wife Cathy went to check out Silo Square. They liked what they saw. James ended up reaching out to Hill. For Hill, this was when his dealings with the national brands evaporated.

“I went up there [to Memphis] and toured South Point and had lunch with Rick, and he showed me all the things that they had done,” Hill said. “Nobody else mattered anymore.”

James said he had his own demographics to consider. Plus, the numbers had to add up.

James has long been in the grocery store game. He started working when he was 15 years old in a tiny market in his hometown in Missouri. Later, he worked for Kroger, moving on to Malone & Hyde in Memphis. He then went on to work for Piggly Wiggly before taking over the brand’s local stores and transitioning those into Cash Savers in 2011.

It was his wife who served as something of a catalyst for an interesting new turn in James’ career. It was during the pandemic, and things were bad. High Point Market’s owner, Charles Shirley, was ready to retire. James had known Shirley for years through his work with Malone & Hyde.

Cathy James read about Shirley wanting to sell High Point and suggested to her husband that he buy it. He was skeptical. But, he did end up buying the store in High Point Terrace, which led him to see the importance of the neighborhood grocery store in a different light.

“I have always loved the neighborhood grocery store,” James said. “I grew up in small towns, and the corner grocer was always a thing in small towns.”

Meanwhile, Tom Archer, owner and president of Archer Custom Builders, had his own plans for a neighborhood grocery store. This one in the South Main neighborhood. He had read about how James had taken over High Point and went to check it out. He was impressed and reached out to James.

“Because we’d done High Point, we had seen what we could do with a small space. We’d seen a neighborhood embrace a store as their own,” James said.

With Walmart and other big chains, the neighborhood store has become something of a lost art form. 

The big chains, said James, lack the in-store experience. At smaller markets, customers know the butcher, they can chat up the cashier, and, if they request a certain item, chances are it will appear on the shelves.

“There’s certainly a nostalgic feel for me of a time when [the neighborhood market] was a community meeting place,” James said. “We describe High Point and South Point as a neighborhood-centric, customer-focused format.”

South Point opened in 2022. It is roughly 13,000 square feet and features a popular sandwich counter, excellent beer selection, and a nice patio area at front.

Castle Retail making another Point

Back at Silo Square, both Hill and James weren’t quite ready to take the plunge. Worse still, interest rates were all but damning the deal.

“We started getting feasibility studies and found that a grocery store in this area was much needed,” Hill recalled. “And then everything kind of went cold.”

When Hill started Silo Square, the price tag was an estimated $200 million. He has since added some 80 acres to the development, and now that figure is around $300 million. 

The residential side of the development has 11 phases. They are in phase eight. But, all along, there was only one phase for the commercial side.

Crucial to Silo Square is its proximity to Snowden Grove and steady stream of folks from the baseball complex and BankPlus Amphitheater. Certainly, these people would want hotel rooms and restaurants and bars and coffee shops.

Of course, Silo Square’s residents would want these things, too. And they would want a grocery store.

As Hill saw it, he wanted Silo Square to be walkable and have everything the residents would need, all without getting into a car.

He could not let go of the grocery store concept.

“I decided I was going to deal with the interest rates, and I was going to take it on the chin,” he said.

The ground on the new South Point at Silo Square will be broken any day now. The project should take about a year to complete.

According to James, the new South Point will be very much like the original South Point. There will be a patio and a sandwich counter. It will also offer locally made goods — a staple of the High Point and South Point stores.

South Point at Silo Square is, however, significantly larger — at about 21,000 square feet. The new store will be located south of the square on the project’s Front Street.

“We’re going to do our best to give it our South Point look and feel,” James said. “We’ll have the same sandwich program there. We will have the porch. The store will be bigger, so we have a little more room to do a few extras. There’ll be some extra touches to this one.”

Hill is a graph paper guy — meaning he likes to draw up plans himself. He did this for South Point at Silo Square, simply putting down four lines to create a rectangle. He left the inside to the Castle Group. And, James, too, drew the plans himself before handing it over to an architect.

“Because they had a blank canvas, they were able to design the inside of that grocery store to flow however they wanted it to flow,” Hill said. “There was absolutely nothing in their way.”

The “Castle” of Castle Retail Group is nod to James’ wife and his five children — Cathy, Addie, Sarah, Taylor, Lauren, and Eric. Today, Addie, Taylor, and Lauren work in the business.

James has had quite a year. It’s the 20th anniversary of Castle Retail Group. He was named Tennessee Grocers & Convenience Store Association’s Retailer of the Year, and Castle Retail Group was an MBJ Small Business Awards winner.

As the South Point store in the South Main area was getting more and more press, developers began to reach out to James to open their own neighborhood stores. James said he couldn’t think about another project until he completed the store. The same goes for the current South Point, though he will consider it once it’s done. He noted that from now on, all his smaller stores will be a “Point.”

For Hill, having the independently owned grocery store in Silo Square fit his bigger vision. It’s why you don’t see multiple chains on Silo Square. He favored mom-and-pop businesses. Even so, South Point was special.

“I didn’t want a national brand. I didn’t want any other mom-and-pop,” he said. “I wanted them.”