wnetmacman wrote:pseudo3d wrote:A "successful" MS entry means placing a few south of the Memphis area, but not Gulfport, Hattiesburg, and Jackson.
What is your basis for this assumption? *IF* they distribute from McCalla, then yes, Memphis and that area would be a good fit. If they distribute from Jacksonville, then the MS Gulf Coast (Biloxi/Gulfport) would be a more likely candidate, especially since WD is fading fast there. They may even be able to take a few of those over as they fail, similar to what Rouses has done.
Anywhere they open and make a profit is a successful entry. They could pop a store in Hattiesburg and take from that huge college town there. Don't count them out because there appears a bigger opportunity. Publix has really only hit Kroger in a few places, and Memphis is the headquarters for the Delta division. I wouldn't go against that for all the tea in China at this point, because Kroger pretty much owns groceries in Memphis. Even Rouses has already closed one of the stores they bought, in Long Beach. That may be scaring companies wanting an inroad.
My question is, "Why hasn't Publix already tried?" and I would guess that the less-affluent population of Mississippi or the way stores have to be run has kept them out and caused them to trend north, not east. Competition would be nice, of course, but if that was true, why has Winn-Dixie performed so badly there, even historically, that they wanted to take Jitney Jungle to prop them up, and that failed? Even three years after bankruptcy (2008), Winn-Dixie had just 15 stores in Mississippi (
link).
pseudo3d wrote:The larger store sizes of Albertsons compounded the problem but that wasn't the main problem, especially considering the size was relatively comparable to other competitors (they were usually 50k-60k square feet), and square footage isn't an issue unless land is at a premium.
Albertsons failed in TN because they bought Seesels, which was already underperforming Kroger in Memphis, and it just never worked for them. It wasn't store size or anything else. They couldn't turn Seesels into Albertsons and make it work. Memphis wanted Seesels. I would compare this to Rite Aid and K&B in New Orleans. Try as hard as they might, Rite Aid just wasn't ever going to be K&B. In MS and AL, they just couldn't compete, and that was near their breakup. The lone southern MS store in Gulfport they got opened is a Belk now. That should clue you in to its sheer size.
If Publix wants Mississippi, now is the time, because WD is retreating, and Kroger only covers half of the state. It's ripe for someone new.[/quote]
I'm not talking about Seessel's, I'm talking about the general way Albertsons stores were built up until around 2002. Albertsons believed that their stores were the best and could be a success anywhere, to the point where they were making bad business decisions, like building on areas with no established traffic counts, wrong demographics, stores that were difficult to access, and so forth. It was the same decisions that led Albertsons to rebrand Lucky. Seessel's was a victim of that, trying to mold a store into something it wasn't. The Mid-South Division, which Smitty's was a part of it was almost wholly composed of that, including Smitty's (MO, spun off from Smitty's-AZ...they had gotten rid of some of the GM, but still had full-service restaurants, which Albertsons surprisingly kept) and Nashville (Bruno's conversions). Some of the MS stores didn't become groceries again because they were too big...they were in the wrong place (a few, including non-Seessel's stores, still operate as Kroger stores). Yeah, one of the MS stores DID become a Belk, but at the time Belk was experimenting with small stores (~50k square feet). Generally, 50k square feet for the late 1990s/early 2000s is not a particularly large grocery store in the South (maybe not Florida). H-E-B opens 50k square feet stores in small towns (like Gonzales). To borrow a well-known phrase, "size doesn't matter" and if Publix goes into the wrong markets in Mississippi (granted, they have better location-picking skills than Albertsons did but whatever) then it doesn't matter if they open small stores vs. big ones.
From what I've heard, Rite Aid ran K&B into the ground, and some of which I've heard from you, but there were other problems. They got rid of the popular K&B ice cream and other products, and even rearranged stores completely differently...my aunt used to live in Louisiana in the 1990s, and she mentioned how she was unhappy at how after the conversions, Rite Aid put lighters and batteries near the floor at a child's reach.