ClownLoach wrote: ↑April 23rd, 2024, 7:41 am
My Asian in-laws wouldn't set foot in a Ralphs if they were giving everything away. For some reason the brand has done very poorly with the Asian community and is strongly disliked. I'm unsure as to why. I was surprised my nieces had never been to a Ralphs in their life. Albertsons has done much better and is able to maintain stores in extremely heavy Asian markets such as Westminster and Fountain Valley where Ralphs closed most or all their stores many years ago. In fact I think Ralphs has closed more stores in predominantly Asian areas than any other. Albertsons has a good reputation for consistent in stocks on those items and they do sell.
Based on the comments here I assume Ralphs is trying to mimic Albertsons expanded assortments of ethnic foods, which will be necessary if they intend to dispatch only Albertsons owned stores in California now. Albertsons has much better assortment of Hispanic foods in stores that need it. Great selection of Asian foods and also International foods in general in their larger boxes. One oddity is Kosher/Jewish food where Albertsons does poorly and I have seen the same issue mentioned above, the section will see the goods all go to clearance and discontinued only to return almost immediately.
I agree with the improved center store at Ralphs. Seeing big cuts to GM areas which are losing an aisle or two during resets, allowing expansion of more core food sections which is a good move. But the horrible execution of their perimeter cancels out the improved center store. The only credit I give Ralphs these days is that I do not see lower quality ad goods on perimeter, unlike Stater, Winco and Albertsons. Ralphs meat is the same full price or on sale, and they do tend to order or cut more when on ad so ironically their quality may be better when on sale. Albertsons and Stater both are guilty of getting lower quality meat for their ads, especially Stater who will have ungraded steaks and Albertsons who will have poor trimming intentionally leaving excess fat to weigh down the meat. Once I got a 3 lb untrimmed tri tip on a big sale at Albertsons to cook on my pellet smoker, and when I was done trimming the membranes, fatty and gristle sections off it was 20 ounces and I realized that I had now effectively paid more than if I just bought full price at Costco where it's already trimmed.
The problem with Ralphs is that they can do wonders with center store but since the perimeter sucks I will always do better just shopping Winco for stock up and then hit someone else on the way home for produce, meat etc like Trader Joe's, Costco or Sam's. Ralphs still manages to be irrelevant to me as a result despite being the only store I could walk to if I wanted to.
On the flip side if you go up to what I call the Pasadena-Alhambra-Monterey Park box, Ralphs is still there and has two core located heavily tailored stores. They did offload a (recently remodeled) store somewhere around there to 99 Ranch some years ago around 2016 or so. Albertsons has a single store. Vons has a handfull of stores on the perimeter of the area.
I've never heard of Ralphs having an image issue with Asian customers. This is interesting to me.
The product mix of Asian items in these Ralphs with the expanded mix is 10 times the SKUs of what the heaviest merchandised Albertsons has. I think the only reason Albertsons is still open in Westminster and Fountain Valley is because they just so happened to be the last conventional left, and if you look at the customer traffic in those stores, I think there are more Hispanics shopping there than any other group.
One Ralphs which I think is fantastic with this expanded mix of Asian and various other ethnicity foods (a large full double-wide aisle) plus a Kitchen Place department is 1770 West Carson Street in Torrance. One Ralphs that is sort of NW of LGB but not in Long Beach city limits was also very large and very similar to that. Speaking of Torrance I see Ralphs has 3 stores there, but Albertsons has 0, and Vons has 2 that don't appear to be doing all that great, one a former Smiths with far more space than they can realistically use, but did get that "colorful wall white letter" repaint of their Lifestyle interiors.
The other half of those GM resets you are seeing at Ralphs is they appear to be trying to squeeze all of the "high theft" items onto a single aisle then they set up a cashier podium at that aisle and block off the back exit of that aisle and make you pay for all items in that aisle at that register. I had to pay for $1 bottle of liquid soap, the employee seemed so bored he was very happy to assist me. Looked at the receipt and it has a very low transaction number so not many transactions happened that day at that register... so this is either hurting sales or a lot of people are not paying at that podium.
No issue with produce in any of the Ralphs I went into. Full departments and a good mix of ripe/not ripe where I needed it. Pricing was much lower on produce there than Albertsons/Vons who had terrible pricing and so so looking departments.
I think both of these chains are somewhat inconsistent by "area" of SoCal also. There are areas where Ralphs is noticeably worse than other areas. Around Los Angeles seems to be where Ralphs puts on its best. Albertsons/Vons seems to do better in perimeter areas.