I'd rate supermarkets as a vicious market:
The plans always will have errors. You make your profit on the extras/ corrections.
The chain has a million tricks to NOT pay for extras.
Competition is brutal: that's why you're invited to bid. The chain wants to use your bid to hammer on the regular players.
First timers will be required to get a performance bond -- usually. Expect to have this bond tapped and you ejected from the job at any time suitable for the chain.
Expect a wild and crazy tempo and the need to man up and down based on their whim.
If you have not learned this specialty while in the pay of another... you'll never make it.
17,000 square feet is no longer deemed enough to be called a supermarket. That scale was passed 40 years ago. 25,000 is considered tiny... 40,000 is tight... 60,000 was the norm as of 2000... now the norm is up towards 80,000 or better.
Figure $ 14 per square foot, or about 18% of the total construction price.
Jobs at this scale are very much different than the small stuff. Just trekking around the site is a labor burden. Figure on never having your materials near to hand -- perhaps they're 350 yards away.... Figure on restaging your materials all the time. Figure on working in the dark. Figure on poor temp power with overloads and outages pretty common. Figure on poor trades coordination and a superintendent in way over his head. Figure on GC getting the site elevation wrong. Figure on the weather breaking wrong ... too hot, too cold, to wet. Figure on a cash flow nightmare as the chain stalls on payment to extract concessions. Figure on cut sheets and plan submittals to be wrong -- way wrong.
Figure on needing a General Foreman who's built for this chain or similar and of whom you have complete trust.
Don't get caught building these 'out of town'. You'll need to be close to all manner of distributor support.
Other than that, building grocery stores for the major chains is a breeze.
