Retail Watchers

A single Randalls store began a surprise store closing sale on Thursday - 50% off the entire store. The store is on 9503 Jones Rd. in Houston.

By Saturday, the store was literally empty. They will probably be closed starting today.

Why would a store close down so quickly? I was in there last Saturday - it was full of food and business as usual. It's in a decent neighborhood although there's a Kroger and a Food Town there as well. What puzzles me is why they decided to go with a 50% off sale instead of their usual tapered sales. Did they need to clear out of that space for some reason?

I do have some pictures if anyone is interested. It's an older type store with 90's stylings.

Sure, we are interested in pictures.

Safeway has made this 50% off sale for a few days a typical closure move in the Vons division.

Safeway Northern California Division closed a store in Reno, NV on January 3 but did not have any liquidation sale. The store was provided closure notice in mid December. The pharmacy was closed with prescription files transferred to Target on December 15. The perimeter departments (meat, produce, bakery, deli) were closed and emptied on December 26. So the store was open for just over a week with a fully (basically) stocked center store, dairy, and frozen, and no perimeter. After the store was closed they packed up the remaining center store goods and sent them elsewhere. This was a large 65,000 square foot store so there was a fair amount of inventory inside.

Here are the pictures.

http://www.mikerichardson.name/tidbits/randalls/

This news story also appeared recently: http://impactnews.com/northwest-houston ... ing-center

It leaves more questions than answers. If another grocery store really is interested in the space, then why wasn't it good enough for Randalls? Unless the store was unprofitable, then it seems unreasonable to close it down. If I were a Safeway shareholder I would be upset.

It just seems like Safeway is running Randalls into the ground. Pretty soon there will be no stores left.

http://www.loopnet.com/property/16181645/9503-Jones-Rd/

This wasn't even a small store. Over 70,000 SF according to that posting.

Really strange.

MikeRich88 wrote:http://www.loopnet.com/property/16181645/9503-Jones-Rd/

This wasn't even a small store. Over 70,000 SF according to that posting.

Really strange.

Hmmm... So $89.228.75 a month rent? That is a lot of money unless the location is really good (such as not having competition or in a very wealthy neighborhood - neither which applies to this location). Sounds like the operating costs combined with low volume (my guess as Texas has become very competitive due to WalMart's major expansion over the last 5-10 years) did this store in.

klkla wrote:Hmmm... So $89.228.75 a month rent? That is a lot of money unless the location is really good (such as not having competition or in a very wealthy neighborhood - neither which applies to this location). Sounds like the operating costs combined with low volume (my guess as Texas has become very competitive due to WalMart's major expansion over the last 5-10 years) did this store in.

I had a theory that maybe the lease came up on the store, and the landlord was trying to extract more money from Safeway, or maybe the landlord wanted another 25 year lease and the store just wasn't doing well enough to commit to that. The shopping center was built in 1985 and I think a 25 year lease is standard. Assuming Randalls was the original anchor, it would make sense.

It also explains the quick liquidation assuming the lease is up on February 1st.