300 Petco Stores To Open in Rural Lowe's Stores

[Alpha8472]

Three hundred Petco stores will open inside of rural Lowe's stores. Vetco clinics will be open once a month.

Perhaps some of these rural areas really don't have pet stores or vets.

Lowe's is trying to offer more rural products in these 300 stores.

https://chainstoreage.com/lowes-targets ... etco-shops

[storewanderer]

This seems like a logical fit conceptually. Menard's has a lot of pet products and the various ranch chains like Big R, Tractor Supply, many Ace/True Value, Do It Best, etc. also have some pet products.

However this seems like something Lowe's should be able to do on its own. Petco's refusal to stock mainstream pet food brands will make this a largely useless department. Lowe's would be better off doing this themself and getting a mix into the stores that would cater to a wider customer base.

[babs]

This seems like a logical fit conceptually. Menard's has a lot of pet products and the various ranch chains like Big R, Tractor Supply, many Ace/True Value, Do It Best, etc. also have some pet products.

However this seems like something Lowe's should be able to do on its own. Petco's refusal to stock mainstream pet food brands will make this a largely useless department. Lowe's would be better off doing this themself and getting a mix into the stores that would cater to a wider customer base.

Agreed. Would love to see the financials behind this. Stocking a small pet area with some food, beds, leashes, etc... just requires hiring a single buyer. Or outsource it to Central Pet & Garden like Kroger does.

[ClownLoach]

This seems like a logical fit conceptually. Menard's has a lot of pet products and the various ranch chains like Big R, Tractor Supply, many Ace/True Value, Do It Best, etc. also have some pet products.

However this seems like something Lowe's should be able to do on its own. Petco's refusal to stock mainstream pet food brands will make this a largely useless department. Lowe's would be better off doing this themself and getting a mix into the stores that would cater to a wider customer base.

Agreed. Would love to see the financials behind this. Stocking a small pet area with some food, beds, leashes, etc... just requires hiring a single buyer. Or outsource it to Central Pet & Garden like Kroger does.

Based on the picture this is more of a co-branding effort than anything else. It's not a very large department. It's not going to have Petco employees or anything like that. Petco will probably become a vendor for Lowe's and send a pallet or two of freight each week via an LTL carrier. This is probably comparable to the Ulta at Target program, about 1% of total floor space acquired by reducing a few unproductive SKUs. Lowe's started testing this a couple years ago and it must have been productive enough to earn a wider rollout. Interesting that they figured somehow the more rural stores would be more effective. Petco is also building stores that have a farm supply and feed lot attached in rural areas. I think Lowe's and Petco both smell an opportunity to squash the poorly operated Tractor Supply Co.

Maybe my experiences are different from most (like Storewanderer and his local Target store that is perpetually broken) - but I find Tractor Supply to be one of the most poorly run retail operations this side of Big Lots. Every Tractor Supply I've tried to shop in my area is trashed - at least 40% of items are out of stock, recovery is atrocious, the stores are filthy dirty and appear they haven't had the floors swept or mopped in months if ever. Whatever it is that I come in for, it's always out of stock and their inventory count is wrong (but then they don't correct it on the spot either). They have bizarre feature merchandising where they cram seasonal buys like trashy decor Hobby Lobby rejected into the center store with so little space you can't get a cart through. The garden center is a joke, it's as if they never signed a plant vendor for SoCal. Every single time I find a bag of something in plain sight that has been partially eaten by rodents, from birdseed to dog food, and then my stomach starts to gurgle when I see the candy and snack racks up front. Service is always poor, never any help except on the register where the cashier is usually disengaged and has a disheveled appearance. Big Lots, Dollar General or any of those operations would fire the Store Manager and District Manager on the spot if one of their stores looks like an everyday SoCal Tractor Supply. I have heard people refer to Tractor Supply as a wonderful place to work and a fantastic store to shop; their recruiters have contacted me multiple times and I've politely declined because I couldn't work for an organization that has such poor standards to allow these vile, filthy, rodent infested stores. I do not see the hype around Tractor Supply at all and cannot comprehend how they're growing so quickly.

[jamcool]

It seems like all retail in California seems to suck, along with fast food places. I blame the attitude.

[ClownLoach]

It seems like all retail in California seems to suck, along with fast food places. I blame the attitude.

Plenty of operators who do very well in California and run good stores here. Same for food (In-N-Out is always great). The stakes are simply higher, there's a fight for limited talent and a higher cost structure that punishes mediocrity.

California is the farm capital of the country and delivers incredible amounts of food to the rest of the country. There are feed lots and farm supply stores all over that know California and serve the customers well. Tractor is a generic crappy chain that thought they could waltz in with their substandard, generic, and wildly overpriced stores selling low quality product. I suspect that they're doing just terrible here, but their arrogance level is so high that they will keep running money losing stores until they run out of red ink. They won't admit failure and leave.

[storewanderer]

Maybe my experiences are different from most (like Storewanderer and his local Target store that is perpetually broken) - but I find Tractor Supply to be one of the most poorly run retail operations this side of Big Lots. Every Tractor Supply I've tried to shop in my area is trashed - at least 40% of items are out of stock, recovery is atrocious, the stores are filthy dirty and appear they haven't had the floors swept or mopped in months if ever. Whatever it is that I come in for, it's always out of stock and their inventory count is wrong (but then they don't correct it on the spot either). They have bizarre feature merchandising where they cram seasonal buys like trashy decor Hobby Lobby rejected into the center store with so little space you can't get a cart through. The garden center is a joke, it's as if they never signed a plant vendor for SoCal. Every single time I find a bag of something in plain sight that has been partially eaten by rodents, from birdseed to dog food, and then my stomach starts to gurgle when I see the candy and snack racks up front. Service is always poor, never any help except on the register where the cashier is usually disengaged and has a disheveled appearance. Big Lots, Dollar General or any of those operations would fire the Store Manager and District Manager on the spot if one of their stores looks like an everyday SoCal Tractor Supply. I have heard people refer to Tractor Supply as a wonderful place to work and a fantastic store to shop; their recruiters have contacted me multiple times and I've politely declined because I couldn't work for an organization that has such poor standards to allow these vile, filthy, rodent infested stores. I do not see the hype around Tractor Supply at all and cannot comprehend how they're growing so quickly.

Tractor is awful and I don't see why they survive. The ones I go into are stocked better than you describe, but high priced and understaffed. They seem to have 1-2 employees in the whole store and last time I tried to buy something I waited forever for the cashier to notice me then in the middle some guy interrupted and wanted help with propane outside and the cashier said she was already in the middle of helping someone on the floor and had to check me out and had to go back on the floor to finish with that customer and didn't know where the keys were for propane and was really flustered (high school aged cashier) and didn't seem to know what to do. I walked over to the Maverik on the next lot over to buy a drink after and the little Maverik store of beer/cigs/soda had 4 employees working and I found it funny a gas station was better staffed than a 25k square foot retail store with some relatively high value items.

I've never heard anyone but some Wall Street people saying positive things about Tractor Supply.

Chains like Toys R Us, Bed Bath and Beyond, Gordmans, Steve & Barrys, etc. also grew quickly and many people never understood quite how. Now they do.

[ClownLoach]

Maybe my experiences are different from most (like Storewanderer and his local Target store that is perpetually broken) - but I find Tractor Supply to be one of the most poorly run retail operations this side of Big Lots. Every Tractor Supply I've tried to shop in my area is trashed - at least 40% of items are out of stock, recovery is atrocious, the stores are filthy dirty and appear they haven't had the floors swept or mopped in months if ever. Whatever it is that I come in for, it's always out of stock and their inventory count is wrong (but then they don't correct it on the spot either). They have bizarre feature merchandising where they cram seasonal buys like trashy decor Hobby Lobby rejected into the center store with so little space you can't get a cart through. The garden center is a joke, it's as if they never signed a plant vendor for SoCal. Every single time I find a bag of something in plain sight that has been partially eaten by rodents, from birdseed to dog food, and then my stomach starts to gurgle when I see the candy and snack racks up front. Service is always poor, never any help except on the register where the cashier is usually disengaged and has a disheveled appearance. Big Lots, Dollar General or any of those operations would fire the Store Manager and District Manager on the spot if one of their stores looks like an everyday SoCal Tractor Supply. I have heard people refer to Tractor Supply as a wonderful place to work and a fantastic store to shop; their recruiters have contacted me multiple times and I've politely declined because I couldn't work for an organization that has such poor standards to allow these vile, filthy, rodent infested stores. I do not see the hype around Tractor Supply at all and cannot comprehend how they're growing so quickly.

Tractor is awful and I don't see why they survive. The ones I go into are stocked better than you describe, but high priced and understaffed. They seem to have 1-2 employees in the whole store and last time I tried to buy something I waited forever for the cashier to notice me then in the middle some guy interrupted and wanted help with propane outside and the cashier said she was already in the middle of helping someone on the floor and had to check me out and had to go back on the floor to finish with that customer and didn't know where the keys were for propane and was really flustered (high school aged cashier) and didn't seem to know what to do. I walked over to the Maverik on the next lot over to buy a drink after and the little Maverik store of beer/cigs/soda had 4 employees working and I found it funny a gas station was better staffed than a 25k square foot retail store with some relatively high value items.

I've never heard anyone but some Wall Street people saying positive things about Tractor Supply.

Chains like Toys R Us, Bed Bath and Beyond, Gordmans, Steve & Barrys, etc. also grew quickly and many people never understood quite how. Now they do.

I hadn't even heard of Tractor until many of my peers from my last company began to go over there and talk about it like they had found retail management nirvana. They would share nearly every posting on LinkedIn from their corporate office and they too make it look like it's really something special. Being a lifetime resident of the LA area I hadn't ever seen their stores but those LinkedIn messages obviously made it look like a fleet of beautifully merchandised, well run stores. It looks like the company spends a lot of money on events a few times a year for their Store Managers, they fly them somewhere with big country music stars doing private performances outside (looks like middle of nowhere but you know it's got to be close enough to big convention center hotels). But now I realize the real reason why they're so happy: low standards and expectations. I have too much self respect to work somewhere that allows rodent infestations to rage on, filthy nasty stores and so forth.

Maybe its because there are too few, too spread out in SoCal and as such there's a lack of upper management supervision? Coupled with a lack of interest in the business? They just come off to me as one of those chains you mentioned like Bed Bath and Beyond who is trying to become a category killer and replace the networks of Business to Business feed lots and other shops that have catered to the farm business for decades. They think that plopping enough stores down will be good enough to crowd out the competition, plus they can try to crowd out some ACE hardware or other franchises too with their generic, low quality crap product like tools that Harbor Freight quality control would turn down (if it's a good tool the shelf is empty and nobody knows if or when it will ever be in stock). Their execution is incredibly poor. The stores obviously lack any form of discipline and don't operate on any kind of routines to maintain in stocks. If I lived in one of those small towns and had to drive to Tractor, only to find out that they didn't care to recover and count the nuts and bolts I needed that would be a "one and done" visit. Every time I've needed something since I moved out here and I've thought "gee, that sounds like something they'd sell at Tractor Supply. I should go over there" I find it on their website and it inevitably tells me it's in stock, only to get to the store and the shelf is empty then there's no one to be found and when I finally hunt down a employee "gee the system is wrong, sorry!".

[storewanderer]

I hadn't even heard of Tractor until many of my peers from my last company began to go over there and talk about it like they had found retail management nirvana. They would share nearly every posting on LinkedIn from their corporate office and they too make it look like it's really something special. Being a lifetime resident of the LA area I hadn't ever seen their stores but those LinkedIn messages obviously made it look like a fleet of beautifully merchandised, well run stores. It looks like the company spends a lot of money on events a few times a year for their Store Managers, they fly them somewhere with big country music stars doing private performances outside (looks like middle of nowhere but you know it's got to be close enough to big convention center hotels). But now I realize the real reason why they're so happy: low standards and expectations. I have too much self respect to work somewhere that allows rodent infestations to rage on, filthy nasty stores and so forth.

Maybe its because there are too few, too spread out in SoCal and as such there's a lack of upper management supervision? Coupled with a lack of interest in the business? They just come off to me as one of those chains you mentioned like Bed Bath and Beyond who is trying to become a category killer and replace the networks of Business to Business feed lots and other shops that have catered to the farm business for decades. They think that plopping enough stores down will be good enough to crowd out the competition, plus they can try to crowd out some ACE hardware or other franchises too with their generic, low quality crap product like tools that Harbor Freight quality control would turn down (if it's a good tool the shelf is empty and nobody knows if or when it will ever be in stock). Their execution is incredibly poor. The stores obviously lack any form of discipline and don't operate on any kind of routines to maintain in stocks. If I lived in one of those small towns and had to drive to Tractor, only to find out that they didn't care to recover and count the nuts and bolts I needed that would be a "one and done" visit. Every time I've needed something since I moved out here and I've thought "gee, that sounds like something they'd sell at Tractor Supply. I should go over there" I find it on their website and it inevitably tells me it's in stock, only to get to the store and the shelf is empty then there's no one to be found and when I finally hunt down a employee "gee the system is wrong, sorry!".

I understand this thing. These rapidly expanding companies have to create a buzz to attract people to help them open new stores/expand. They have got to keep opening stores in order to please Wall Street. It is not an optional thing. This was a big thing for Kohl's back in the 90's/00's, Walgreens throughout the 00's, Wal Mart throughout the 90's/00's, etc.

It has also been my observation that Tractor after COVID significantly cut their already tight labor in their stores and never brought it back again. First excuse was the shortage of staffing but that is not so much of a thing anymore (unless you don't pay enough). One of their stores in my area still has a decent amount of staffing (5-6 employees at a given time) but the other two are being staffed/run like a Dollar General (1-2 employees).

[steps]

I really prefer Petco over PetSmart. PetSmart to me is way overpriced and employees don't seem to be that knowledgeable about products. Petco stores seem to be well staffed and have a nice variety of product.