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Why Treasure Island died

Crain's has some good reporting on why local grocery chain Treasure Island went out of business this month:

After Christ Kamberos' death, Maria Kamberos became president and CEO and appointed her son, Christ Kamberos Jr., vice president of development. (Frank Kamberos, who is in his 90s, ceased playing an active role in the chain long ago. Whether he remains an owner in Treasure Island could not be determined, but public records show he does retain ownership, along with Maria Kamberos, of the real estate affiliated with the stores.) They renovated the Gold Coast store in 2013 and the Lake Shore Drive location last year, though some shoppers were underwhelmed by the efforts in comparison to the new Whole Foods and Mariano's stores that cropped up after the demise of Dominick's. As recently as October 2017—a decade after opening in Hyde Park, its newest location—Christ Kamberos Jr. said publicly that the company would open an eighth location in a new luxury apartment development in Uptown. (The store never materialized.)

But inside the stores and the corporate office, employees say, operations notably deteriorated at the beginning of 2018.

Inventory deliveries were intermittent for most of 2018, according to six employees, all of whom asked not to be named. Photos provided to Crain's by a senior employee show a loaf of Treasure Island bakery bread with a July 24, 2018, sell-by sticker placed on top of an original July 4 sticker. Moreover, store-level employees say paychecks not deposited immediately would sometimes take days to clear or would bounce.

Personal squabbles; corner-cutting that backfired; treating employees badly; and the rise of Whole Foods and Mariano's. Those things killed Treasure Island.

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