Fresh & Easy to Open Three Stores in the Las Vegas, Nevada Metropolitan Region Tomorrow and Friday

Continuing its February new store opening blitz, Tesco's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market will open three new stores in Nevada on Thursday and Friday. Two of the new small-format, convenience-oriented grocery stores will be in the city of Henderson, Nevada, which is only about seven miles from Las Vegas, and the third new Fresh & Easy neighborhood grocery market will be in North Las Vegas.

The stores' will be about 10,000 -to- 13,000 square feet--the standard size for the Fresh & Easy market format-- and feature the grocer's combination of Fresh & Easy brand and national branded basic, everyday grocery products, fresh produce and meats, fresh, prepared ready-to-eat and ready-to-heat foods, and a selection of specialty, natural and organic grocery items.

Each Fresh & Easy store also has a food sampling area in it, where a store clerk offers shoppers various selections of the store's prepared foods' offerings as tastings during store hours. The stores, which are neighborhood discount grocery store meets Trader Joe's in their format style and product selections, also sell fresh flowers and plants, some non-foods items, a selection of wines, including a line of Australian wines which retail for $1.99 a bottle, craft beers and (in most locations) spirits.

Tesco is making a major push into the Las Vegas, Nevada metropolitan region with its Fresh & Easy grocery stores. The city of Henderson is located about seven miles southeast of Las Vegas, making it part of the city's metropolitan region even though it is an incorporated city. Henderson is Nevada's second-largest city after Las Vegas, with a population of about 180,000 residents.

The Las Vegas metropolitan region has a population of nearly 2 million people. The region's population was the fastest-growing in the U.S. between 1990 and 2000, soaring by a whopping 83% during that 10 year time period. A third of all new arrivals to the region are from California, according to the city of Las Vegas and the U.S. Census Bureau.

With the three new stores opening before the end of this week, Fresh & Easy will have a current total of nine Nevada stores, all located in the Las Vegas metropolitan region. More new stores are planned for the area and state before the end of 2008.