Retail Watchers

storewanderer wrote: ↑June 1st, 2019, 11:29 pm Harris Teeter is on Kroger's cash registers and that is really it. They are still on their old systems for private label (even redesigning the old private label as we speak into designs that are NOT Kroger designs...), shelf tags, merchandising, perimeter, ads, and basically everything else. Some of those Harris Teeter private label items are coming out of Kroger plants, though.

They do have a few random Simple Truth items sitting around but HT Organics is much more common. HT private label is still in full swing even in the drug category.

Kroger has opted to not ruin Harris Teeter with its current (past couple years) round of mass standardization to the Kroger, Smiths, Ralphs, Frys, Fred Meyer, Dillons, etc. banners that has been in my view not good.

Harris Teeter must make a ton of money to continue so independently.

cw06 wrote: ↑August 16th, 2019, 10:24 am

storewanderer wrote: ↑June 1st, 2019, 11:29 pm Harris Teeter is on Kroger's cash registers and that is really it. They are still on their old systems for private label (even redesigning the old private label as we speak into designs that are NOT Kroger designs...), shelf tags, merchandising, perimeter, ads, and basically everything else. Some of those Harris Teeter private label items are coming out of Kroger plants, though.

They do have a few random Simple Truth items sitting around but HT Organics is much more common. HT private label is still in full swing even in the drug category.

Kroger has opted to not ruin Harris Teeter with its current (past couple years) round of mass standardization to the Kroger, Smiths, Ralphs, Frys, Fred Meyer, Dillons, etc. banners that has been in my view not good.

Harris Teeter must make a ton of money to continue so independently.

I worked there for about 4 years, through the merger and up until a few months ago. We had almost no contact with Kroger corporate at all (other than a store visit by Kroger execs shortly after the deal closed). Everything is handled by the corporate office in Charlotte.

From what I was told, HT got a lot of it's private label products from Kroger even before the merger, so nothing is really being "replaced". Simple Truth organic apples come from Ranier, so we didn't even know anything was different until we opened the box.

As the poster above said, the big integration was in the POS system. HT's old one was buggy and prone to crashing a lot, it seemed like the Fujitsu techs were in every week to fix a unit. It also wasn't fully compatible with Starbucks rewards cards. They had to be run like a check, feeding a blank piece of paper through the check printer, and taking the card number down on paper to submit later (customers were also aggravated that they couldn't earn Starbucks points through HT Starbucks).

HT is very profitable, that's why Kroger bought it. If you read the quarterly statements, HT is often what keeps the stock up. They haven't been so dumb (yet) to kill their golden goose.

storewanderer wrote: ↑August 16th, 2019, 9:18 pm

cw06 wrote: ↑August 16th, 2019, 10:24 am

storewanderer wrote: ↑June 1st, 2019, 11:29 pm Harris Teeter is on Kroger's cash registers and that is really it. They are still on their old systems for private label (even redesigning the old private label as we speak into designs that are NOT Kroger designs...), shelf tags, merchandising, perimeter, ads, and basically everything else. Some of those Harris Teeter private label items are coming out of Kroger plants, though.

They do have a few random Simple Truth items sitting around but HT Organics is much more common. HT private label is still in full swing even in the drug category.

Kroger has opted to not ruin Harris Teeter with its current (past couple years) round of mass standardization to the Kroger, Smiths, Ralphs, Frys, Fred Meyer, Dillons, etc. banners that has been in my view not good.

Harris Teeter must make a ton of money to continue so independently.

I worked there for about 4 years, through the merger and up until a few months ago. We had almost no contact with Kroger corporate at all (other than a store visit by Kroger execs shortly after the deal closed). Everything is handled by the corporate office in Charlotte.

From what I was told, HT got a lot of it's private label products from Kroger even before the merger, so nothing is really being "replaced". Simple Truth organic apples come from Ranier, so we didn't even know anything was different until we opened the box.

As the poster above said, the big integration was in the POS system. HT's old one was buggy and prone to crashing a lot, it seemed like the Fujitsu techs were in every week to fix a unit. It also wasn't fully compatible with Starbucks rewards cards. They had to be run like a check, feeding a blank piece of paper through the check printer, and taking the card number down on paper to submit later (customers were also aggravated that they couldn't earn Starbucks points through HT Starbucks).

HT is very profitable, that's why Kroger bought it. If you read the quarterly statements, HT is often what keeps the stock up. They haven't been so dumb (yet) to kill their golden goose.

I wonder if they have an agreement to keep Harris Teeter as is, in terms of its corporate structure, for a certain time period. I believe they had some kind of agreement like that with Jay C and that was why Jay C remained a stand alone division for as long as it did (it got absorbed by Louisville a while ago I believe).

cw06 wrote: ↑August 24th, 2019, 12:31 pm

I think there was a 5 year agreement. Kroger wasn't looking to absorb HT though, they wanted to learn from HT's operational processes and apply them to the rest of the company. Things like clicklist, and some fresh foods marketing have made their way out to Kroger as a whole. HT execs have been promoted up to Kroger divisions, so Kroger is getting "Teeterized" a little.