Kroger to buy Roundy's for $800 million

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pseudo3d
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Re: Kroger to buy Roundy's for $800 million

Post by pseudo3d »

rwsandiego wrote:Kroger has migrated Mariano's, Pick n Save, and Copp's to their standard website design. Not sure when it occurred, as I don't check out Mariano's that often, but it has happened.
Interesting that the websites were merged, as the sites at Safeway and Albertsons still haven't integrated all that well. Makes me wonder how the operations have done. Do Mariano's and the Roundy's stores still have separate décor?
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Re: Kroger to buy Roundy's for $800 million

Post by storewanderer »

Wow, that attempt to throw the Mariano's website into the Kroger "mold" is terrible. At first I thought they took away the descriptions of Mariano's various "departments" but they did not quite do that. If you go to the "specialty brands" tab, it has stuff on their coffee concept (links to a separate website), BBQ concept, and Oyster Bar concept. Those are departments that serve prepared foods, not brands. Maybe they package some items up with those department names on them, maybe that can be called a specialty brand. Kind of downplays the whole thing.

Also now the store locator does not clearly show what Mariano's locations have what prepared foods features. Which have BBQ? Which have Oyster Bar? The Kroger locator just shows generic "Restaurant" as a feature. Yeah, every Mariano's has prepared foods, but some have more than others. The website before clearly showed what specific prepared foods offerings each location had.

Mariano's ad looks nothing like a Kroger ad in any way. No Kroger items are there. The prices are clearly not Kroger type ad prices as most are ending in $, .25, or .50. A lot of the items in that ad, would not even be sold at a standard Kroger.
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Re: Kroger to buy Roundy's for $800 million

Post by rwsandiego »

pseudo3d wrote:
rwsandiego wrote:Kroger has migrated Mariano's, Pick n Save, and Copp's to their standard website design. Not sure when it occurred, as I don't check out Mariano's that often, but it has happened.
Interesting that the websites were merged, as the sites at Safeway and Albertsons still haven't integrated all that well. Makes me wonder how the operations have done. Do Mariano's and the Roundy's stores still have separate décor?
I don't know but will look the next time I visit Chicago. The only stores I can see receiving new decor would be the ones taken over from Dominick's. Park Ridge has Lifestyle 1.0 (minus some of the department signage) and Edgewater has Lifestyle 2.0, also minus some of the department signage (which just looks weird, as you can see below). The stores in existence before the acquisition of the Dominick's locations are pretty new, but Kroger does like to remodel on a regular basis so who knows what will happen.

Image <=Edgewater Mariano's, formerly Dominick's

Image <=Park Ridge Mariano's, formerly Dominick's, which doesn't look as odd because there aren't any arches, photos, or molding. When Dominick's built this store it had a prepared food area that made Mariano's look like a Circle K. That angled area with the registers in front was the prepared food area. The produce/restaurant area was as big as the store it replaced, which started out as a Kroger and Walgreen's. If memory serves, it had Italian (of course), Asian, carving stations, salad bar, and sandwich bar. Safeway dispended with that in short order.

Image <= Harwood Heights Mariano's, which was built as a Mariano's. Note the similarity between its decor and that of Park Ridge.

To @storewanderer's point, the website integration is not exactly the greatest ever. Not a huge Safeway or Albertsons fan here, but at least we don't have a situation like the Mariano's website. Given the converted Dominick's locations have significantly less in the way of prepared foods, the website listing of available foods was a great tool that will be missed. That said, a lot of the prepared food wasn't as great as it looked, so perhaps Kroger plans to thin out some of the prepared foods.

It will be interesting to see what Kroger does with the Ukranian Village location. It is small and, from some of the Yelp reviews, appears to have less in the way of accouterments than the typical Mariano's. They could always make it similar to the Point Loma Ralphs (the former VONS on Rosecrans, not the one on Sports Arena). It has extensive prepared foods and a very small center store area. However, there is a full-service VONS down the street, unlike the Ukieville store which is pretty much in the middle of a food desert and is the only standard supermarket within walking distance.

If Kroger tinkers too much with Mariano's and Jewel ups its game in select stores (which it already has with the Evanston Howard Street store), Mariano's will lose the cache it currently has. Will be interesting to watch.
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