Nobody thought Publix could crack Charlotte. I was at Augusta during Masters week when I met the development team from Stiles Corporation, a Fort Lauderdale-based developer carrying a quietly enormous assignment in their pocket. I can’t say much about how that conversation came together, only that I was sworn to secrecy and that what followed changed the next several years of my career.

Full disclosure before we go further: if you asked me for my last meal, it would be Publix fried chicken and key lime pie. No hesitation. Say what you will about Florida Man. He knows a thing or two about key lime pie. I say this not to be a mouthpiece for their deli department, but because it matters to how hard I fought for this assignment.

Publix Super Markets wanted to open up to twenty stores in the Charlotte area, moving north into a market dominated for thirty years by Harris Teeter, the upscale grocery chain headquartered right here in Matthews. Harris Teeter had spent decades building a wall around this city, store by store, block by block, until they had a location within a mile of nearly every rooftop worth chasing. For the first time in anyone’s memory, they were about to face real competition in their own backyard.

Three of those Publix stores were mine to find and structure: Randolph Road in Cotswold, SouthEnd, and Mint Hill. One deal in particular taught me something I still use on every assignment I touch.

Here’s what it taught me: the most powerful question in a negotiation is not “how much.” It’s “why not?“

Nine Months of Wrong Answers

The first nine months of this assignment were humbling.

I came in with what I thought was a strong list: fifteen locations in fast-growing corridors across the Charlotte region. New neighborhoods. High traffic counts. Strong demographics. Every one of them made sense to me.

Publix shot down every single one.

I went back to the drawing board. Refined the criteria. Came back with more sites. More rejections. After nearly a year of wrong answers, my Stiles contact helped me see what I was missing.

We were not simply looking for good grocery sites. We were looking for proven customer patterns in established submarkets where Publix could compete from day one. That meant the best opportunities were often the hardest sites to control.

That’s when the assignment changed completely.

The Building That Wasn’t For Sale

The Cotswold neighborhood sits in the southeast quadrant of Charlotte: old money, high incomes, the kind of zip code where Harris Teeter had been entrenched for years. Right next to their flagship Cotswold store sat a Class B medical office building on Randolph Road. Older. Functional. Not glamorous. And owned by a local investor named Milton Silver.

Milton and I had a good relationship. Which made the next six months all the more educational.

Every thirty days, I’d sit down with Milton and make an offer on that building. Every thirty days, Milton would smile, thank me for my time, and politely decline. He mentioned, more than once, that dozens of people had expressed interest in the property over the years. He also let it drop that Sonic Automotive, whose headquarters sat directly behind his building, was circling the asset and prepared to pay a significant number.

That was not comfortable information. Sonic had deep pockets and a clear strategic reason to want the site. By any conventional measure, I was in a losing position.

Most brokers in that situation would have walked away, updated their comps spreadsheet, and moved on. I didn’t walk away. But I also stopped doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Instead, I asked Milton a question I probably should have asked months earlier:

“Milton, why won’t you sell?”

The Question That Changed Everything

Here’s what I learned. Milton Silver wasn’t being stubborn. He wasn’t playing games. He had a very specific problem, and nobody, including me, had bothered to understand it.

His basis in that building was extremely low. A traditional sale would trigger a significant tax event. For a family investor managing a generational portfolio, that was a real obstacle, not a negotiating position.

The moment I understood that, the deal came into focus.

I recalled that Publix had structured a ground lease on a Florida property not long before. I got approval to explore the structure, and went back to Milton with a completely different proposition.

Instead of buying the building, what if Publix leased the land?

Here’s how a ground lease works in plain English. Rather than selling the underlying property, the landowner leases the land to a tenant for a long-term period, in this case fifty years. The tenant redevelops the site at their own expense. The landowner receives a stable, escalating income stream for the life of the lease. When the lease expires, the improved property reverts to the landowner, or their heirs.

For Milton, this solved every problem at once. No taxable sale event. Steady, institutional-quality income escalating three percent annually for fifty years. And at the end of it, his family gets back not a vacant lot but a fully improved property: a flagship Publix store worth significantly more than what they started with.

“He called me and asked if we would sell one of our signature assets. I told him no. He said, ‘Well, why?’ That was the first thing that was unique about John. He asked ‘Why?’ where most people left it at no. What he found was we’d sign a ground lease with Publix. That took our taxation obstacle off the table and had an added benefit of a generation-skipping vehicle for our children.”

~ Milton Silver, Silver Investments, Ltd.

Every time I see Milton now, he’s got a big smile on his face. His wife shops at the Publix that sits where his medical office building used to be, knowing the family owns the ground beneath it.

Three Stores. Three Different Problems.

The Cotswold deal cracked the code, but each location that followed had its own wrinkle.

In Mint Hill, Publix initially rejected the site outright: they didn’t believe the market was there. We felt differently. So we went out and counted every new rooftop within a two-mile radius, a ground-level survey that exposed a significant gap in their data. The numbers we brought back changed their minds. It’s now one of their more profitable Charlotte locations.

The SouthEnd store presented a different kind of obstacle: a contaminated site that most developers had written off as too complicated. It wasn’t. Today that store sits above a two-story parking deck, and it’s one of the most accessible grocery locations in the city. In and out. No drama. Exactly what a dense urban neighborhood needs.

Five total stores opened across Charlotte in that first wave. The announcement made significant news, precisely because the secrecy had held. Charlotte woke up one morning to find that Publix had arrived, fully formed, in the heart of Harris Teeter’s territory.

What Happened to Harris Teeter

The competitive pressure was real and measurable. According to Harris Teeter’s Wikipedia entry, industry analysts widely interpreted the chain’s 2012 decision to swap six outlying stores with Lowes Foods while consolidating around premium urban locations as a defensive maneuver ahead of Publix’s arrival. Harris Teeter was tightening its perimeter.

On July 9, 2013, while Publix was still building out its Charlotte footprint, Harris Teeter announced it was selling itself to The Kroger Company for $2.44 billion in cash. The deal closed on January 28, 2014.

Kroger’s CFO cited entry into the Charlotte market as one of the strategic rationales for the acquisition. And as a marketing professor at Wake Forest University told Axios Charlotte: rather than fight the competitive headwinds gathering in the Southeast, Kroger decided to acquire the brand Publix would be competing against. Harris Teeter was profitable when it sold. But it was also facing something it had not faced in decades: a credible opponent on home turf.

Publix’s entry into Charlotte didn’t cause Harris Teeter to sell. But it changed the calculus. The public record makes that case clearly enough.

Today, according to Chain Store Guide’s 2026 Grocery Industry Market Share report, the Charlotte metro grocery market generates $11 billion in annual sales. Publix has grown to a 10.9% market share across 28 area locations, up from zero a decade ago. Harris Teeter holds 15.4% and is declining slightly year over year. Wegmans is opening its first Charlotte store in Ballantyne this fall. Whole Foods has a new south Charlotte location in the works.

The grocery competition that began quietly in 2007 is still being fought. The battlefield just keeps getting bigger.

“But That’s a Pretty Unusual Deal Structure. My Situation Is Different.”

Fair point. Ground leases are not the right answer for every transaction. They require a landowner with specific circumstances: low basis, long time horizon, interest in generational wealth transfer, and a tenant with the credit quality to make the income stream meaningful. Publix, with one of the strongest balance sheets in the grocery industry, fit that profile perfectly.

But here’s what is universally applicable: the structure of this deal was only possible because someone finally asked the right question.

In my experience, most stalled negotiations aren’t stalled because the parties are too far apart on price. They’re stalled because nobody has taken the time to understand what the other side actually needs. Sellers have tax concerns, timing constraints, family dynamics, legacy considerations. Buyers have approvals, entitlement risk, capital allocation pressures. The moment you stop negotiating price and start solving problems, the universe of possible deals expands dramatically.

This is the core of what we put into The Negotiation Worksheet™, a structured process for understanding not just what you want from a negotiation, but what the other side is actually trying to protect. The worksheet forces you to ask the question Milton’s building kept asking me: not how much, but why not.

The Takeaway

The deal that cannot be done with money can almost always be done with the right question.

I spent six months trying to outbid Sonic on a building Milton Silver didn’t want to sell. Once I understood why he wouldn’t sell, the deal was actually straightforward. The creative structure followed naturally from solving his real problem.

Whether you’re negotiating a real estate transaction, a supplier contract, or an executive compensation package, the principle holds. The most sophisticated negotiators I’ve ever encountered aren’t the ones who bring the biggest checkbooks. They’re the ones who ask the best questions and actually listen to the answers.

The Cotswold Publix still sits on Randolph Road, next door to that Harris Teeter. And the Silver family still owns the ground beneath it.

That’s what the right question can do for you, too.