Agreed on all that. Stop & Shop has problems, but nothing insurmountable. Shaw's is still kind of a wild card; they are doing better than they had been but that's not saying much, and they have troubles with Market Basket in southern New England and Hannaford to the north. ACME is probably 1/3 or 1/4 made up of acquired A&P stores, and Kroger already passed on those one time around. Are the stores doing better under ACME than A&P? Based on my North Jersey observations, some absolutely are, some are decidedly not. Kroger already rejected the A&P stores 10 years ago, and people believed that's because they didn't want fixer-uppers. (Although apparently they were interested in the Pathmarks, which really surprises me.) Has ACME put in enough work to make those acquired stores no longer fixer-uppers? Many are quite nice, but not significantly different from A&P. Sure, A&P's problems with expired food and poor perishables quality are gone and ACME has done quite well on freshness lately, but more than anything, the ACMEs feel just like a better-run A&P -- not a step forward. Even though Kroger isn't in the northeast, I doubt they're pursuing the merger for the northeast.pseudo3d wrote: ↑April 15th, 2024, 7:01 amRight! I always forget about it...probably because it's never talked about. But if Kroger really wanted ACME, Shaw's/Star Market, etc. that would go over very easily and ACME would be Fresher Than Fresh(TM) right now.storewanderer wrote: ↑April 14th, 2024, 8:21 pmThe entire PA/Northeast is gained territory. I don't know why Kroger wants it... they're taking over lousy assets and I don't think their operating style will work in the Northeast especially with the assets they are purchasing which contain far too many undersized poor stores...
Ahold (minus Food Lion) would have been a way better play for Kroger (yes even Stop N Shop, which I think Kroger could have fixed).
And don't forget, in addition to Star Market, you also have Kings and Balducci's. Star Market runs very nice, large, and modern stores, and they're very busy. Looking at Placer.ai foot traffic data, they're slightly busier than their Stop & Shop counterparts within Boston and its immediate suburbs. Kings and Balducci's are a mess. Both are intended to be positioned as gourmet markets, but execution is not better than meh and the stores seem to be very low-volume. Kroger, too, doesn't want gourmet markets.
I will push back slightly on the idea that the stores are undersized. Some definitely are, but don't forget, everything is a little smaller and older in the Northeast. Many of the stores are small because there simply isn't room to build a newer, larger one, or (in some of the tiny New England towns) there just isn't a demand for anything more than that. In Wilmington, VT, the Shaw's is a former Grand Union of around 20,000 square feet, but does the town of 2200 people need more than that? In Hoboken, NJ, the ACME is about 24,000 square feet, but where in Hoboken could you build a larger store? Then again, neither ACME nor Shaw's has many stores above about 65,000 square feet, and there are definitely places they could have larger stores. But on the other hand, I believe the 60-90,000 square foot Stop & Shop stores in my area are way too big. Kroger, though, might be able to fill the space in a way that Stop & Shop or Albertsons can't.