Retail Watchers

I'm going to be interested to see if Stater goes deeper into San Diego or if Ralphs buys some of these stores. Ralphs seems like they have done poorly in many areas around San Diego, they have had a steady stream of store closures there in the past few years and the stores they closed were largely 1...

Safeway has lost significant market share since 2008 in Phoenix yet only closed a few stores during that time. This supports my theory that they are sitting on a ton of poorly performing stores in that region, which is also the observation I have made when visiting stores. Albertsons has closed many...

I think the Albertsons Northwest Division may be waking up. Probably just in time for Safeway to take over its remaining stores. Pricing is looking better and they are running good ads. I think they've cleaned up the stores, too. Staffing and employee attitude appears okay too. I was in the Bellingh...

Market share data is difficult, the most important thing is when comparing year over year performance in a given market that the same source is used. Even then, these sources "re draw the boundaries" and sometimes outlying areas that could be of importance are included one year with a give...

I was in BC last week and went to a lot of Safeway Stores. Great stores. All were lifestyle format, the perimeters looked 10x better than the US Stores (better mix, better staffing levels, better pricing relative to competition, great freshness and quality; they basically sell the same items as the ...

Is Bashas really in a position to buy any more stores? I don't think they will have to sell many stores in AZ at all. There is so much competition there. Safeway has so many poorly performing stores in AZ, I've heard the majority of their AZ Stores lose money and very very few are actually profitabl...

Denver is loaded with very poorly performing Safeway Stores and numerous non-lifestyle stores. Albertsons few remaining stores are in good shape and good performers. Albertsons pricing is much lower than Safeway's in Denver, service is better, and quality is better. I guess it is easy when you've cl...

This one seems to be the most drastic and the one that will require the most stores to be divested. So I am curious as I do not know this market at all, how is the capex for Safeway and Albertsons in this market? Are we dealing with mostly lifestyle and SVU remodeled stores, or are there some old st...

I went into the Edmonds Store yesterday and aside from the pharmacy being closed it was a fully functioning store. Fully stocked and perimeter was operating 100%. The staff did not seem happy, to say the least.

They are saying they could not renegotiate leases on these stores, and 150 employees are impacted in the closures. Based on the employee count, it does not sound like the stores were especially struggling (employee count would have been down below 50 each in that case). It was my observation the one...