Retail Watchers

It seems like the new leadership at Raley's has begun to change some things for a clearer future. Over the past few days they have rolled out some new things that are changing the looks of the stores and their product placement.

For one, they have rolled out "Lower Prices on Over 5000 Items"

These banners are all over the store especially around products with price reductions. Looking at these on their ad and in store, their prices are definitely more competitive and beat Safeway and Save Mart for sure. Still a bit above Walmart and Winco though.

They also got rid of their confusing 1-100 NuVal score system and created a much simpler labeling system they call Raley's Self Guide that is explained here-
https://raleysstories.com/introducing-r ... elf-guide/
This is similar to how Nugget labels their products which is easy to understand and much less confusing than the 1-100 score previously used.

Finally, they also now are doing ShipToHome where they are shipping nutrition based products directly from their Natomas warehouse to homes around the country. I can't see this being too successful but I guess it involves minimal employment and they already have the stock in place.

Feels similar to the "Let's Begin" and lower prices program they did a year or two ago... more items this time around, but many of the same ones. They've been more competitive than Safeway or Save Mart for a while now. They also run stronger ads than they used to.

They have started to run some zone pricing up in Nevada. The stores that compete with Smiths are on a slightly lower price scale (maybe 5% lower pricing pretty much across the board) than the others. That encompasses some poorly performing locations like Sparks and North Hills.

Raley's dropped prices after Safeway (which dropped them after Amazon/Whole Foods). Banana wars.

Save Mart doesn't seem to be doing anything in response to the price cuts that both Raleys and Safeway have done...