Retail Watchers

I just came from a shrinking Burlington in Albuquerque (Montgomery Plaza location). The store used to be a large L-shaped store, with a lower level for one side of the L. They have walled off the escalators to the lower level (used to be baby and coats) and are in the process of walling off the east...

Zuni and San Mateo didn't have TLE before the expansion to a supercenter in the early 2000's. As it was, in order to add grocery, they had to buy out an apartment building next door and paid the owner to buy residents out of their leases, but the owner tried to take the money and run. After delays, ...

In Albuquerque, one of the stores (Zuni and San Mateo) just remodeled and downsized, but remained a Super Center. It looks like they consolidated general merchandise, moved the pharmacy and HBA back to the general merchandise side of the store (from being moved adjacent to grocery in a previous remo...

Even in Bozeman, where Smith's continues to operate, they moved the store a mile or two away (not sure what the deal here was; the Buttrey was in a mall very close to an Albertsons; the space became either a movie theater or Barnes & Noble -- I'm not sure which). The Bozeman space was at one ti...

Malls and most other retail are closed. Hardware stores are exempted as they are considered essential--repairing broken whatever is an exception to the closures. The number of positive cases has jumped by hundreds each day for the last week and as of yesterday, there were less than 100 total hospita...

75 shoppers or 25% of maximum capacity during our current Covid 19 reset--until 11/30. That applies to big box (and other stores) that get at least 1/3 of their revenue from food and drink. So, yes, a Walmart is capped, just like the Albertsons Market I went to today.

The remodeled stores in Albuquerque do a better job using the space than the older Jewel-Osco/Lucky-SavOn stores did. That being said, the stores that haven't been touched are blah at best, with large areas of filler merchandise. Doing a quick comparison of the ad prices between Albuquerque (United)...

Except that Midland and Odessa are in Texas, not New Mexico. There's been nothing so far about changing the NM stores to United. in fact, they've remodeled two Albuquerque stores completely and added Albertsons Market signage to a couple of others. United coming to Albuquerque would be a totally new...

They tried the dollar store route a few years back. We had one in Albuquerque--KDollar. It was a hybrid of a closeout store and dollar store with portions of the store curtained off. It operated for a while and then liquidated completely.

That Albertsons is located in DeVargas Center, the mall that is nearest the plaza in Santa Fe. The mall is combination of enclosed and outdoor-only access. The center also has a Sprouts, CVS, Office Depot, and Ross, along with local and upscale shops (i.e. very fancy kitchen store, designer dog bout...