Retail Watchers

The Kong Kone at Maceys looked insane! Everything looks so cheap in Utah. Especially coming from up here in the Seattle area where the cost of living is fairly high, things do seem to be surprisingly cheap in Utah. I think a gallon of gas averages 30 cents less than up here, housing is cheaper by a...

Without knowing where all of the stores in question are located, it looks like Associated Food Stores runs a relatively small number of corporate stores in Utah under various names, and would probably be using those names to rebrand the Albertson's stores. Macey's (10 stores in the Salt Lake area) i...

And just to make things interesting, one of the two Costco Home stores has already been replaced by a (shockingly similar, according to this account ) store known as My Home Wholesale. It is surprising how quickly the new store opened, especially Given the fact that Costco Home itself only closed on...

I guess it depends on the Fred Meyer store, but that doesn't seem to be happening consistently here. For example, the Issaquah store (built in the early part of this decade) was built with exposed concrete floors, but the Redmond store (built about 2-3 years after Issaquah using a somewhat unusual t...

I know Franz bakeries (a local/regional bakery in Washington, Oregon and Northern California that handles a good chunk of the mass-produced baked goods market around here) started selling a pretty good imitation of the Circus Animals cookies not too long ago, but I'm not sure if they started selling...

Do the Arco stations there still use the old QuickPay units (a single card reader unit for several pumps) for cards? I know around here, a lot of the Arco stations still have those, especially older ones (and there are some locations around here old enough to have opened as Richfield stations before...

Up here in the Seattle Metro area, there are a number of Safeway gas stations, and as far as I know, those stations are supplied by Shell (I know this because they ended up getting affected when a batch of bad gas messed up a bunch of cars at some of the local Shell stations, including my Dad's car....

Just a couple of years ago someone rammed the front of a TJMaxx store (which takes up part of a former Lamonts/Gottschalks location) up here with the gas/brake excuse.

I am currently visiting my brother and sister down in Utah, and on Saturday my brother took me over to the Macey's store near his apartment (Macey's is a small 9-store chain local to the Salt Lake Valley,) and made me try out their Kong Kone, just about the most ridiculously huge soft serve ice crea...

If I recall correcly, HomeBase liquidated in either 2000 or 2001. I only visited the one here a couple of times while it was open, and it seemed like a so-so box store home improvement chain. They seemed to do fine on their own, but as soon as Home Depot and Lowe's began to move into their territory...