Retail Watchers

Stater Bros is featuring the grand reopening of the new Oceanside store on their social media this week. Some of the pictures showed some of the areas that were missing when the store was almost finished a few weeks ago like the cake counter and other areas. Next time I'm down there I'll take a look...

There's not a lot of residential in downtown Honolulu and with the paid parking, they probably got mostly walk-in traffic. I can't imagine they sold a ton of groceries outside of being an overgrown convenience store. My assumption is that the nearby stacked Walmart/Sam's combo over by the Ala Mona ...

These supermarket Krispy Kreme products always looked disgusting, slimy and stale appearance. Their product is only good in the plain original glazed, only if eaten red hot within a couple minutes after taken off the doughnut machine. The glaze turns to liquid and the doughnut loses most of its fla...

The Walmart in Downtown Honolulu that used to be a Macy's is closing as well. I gotta think theft, high operating costs and fewer people working in the office in downtown Honolulu did it in. Another irregular format store closing. Probably had an odd sales mix with that location. There's not a lot ...

Interesting reading your observations of FoodMaxx. It seems they have a lot of regional variation, because mine are fairly well staffed, usually 2-3 lanes open (no self checkout here) and several employees on the floor. Their pricing does seem to be a bit higher than Winco, but my credit card rewar...

These supermarket Krispy Kreme products always looked disgusting, slimy and stale appearance. Their product is only good in the plain original glazed, only if eaten red hot within a couple minutes after taken off the doughnut machine. The glaze turns to liquid and the doughnut loses most of its flav...

They are supposed to use diamond pads to grind concrete down so it shines. When a Walmart near me got a concrete floor conversion from tile about 5 years ago, it was really shiny at first. Over the years the surface got scratched up, so now it is very dull. Stripping concrete with chemicals and the...

Haggen tried to go from 20 stores (and declining) to closer to 200 stores almost overnight. They got no distribution centers. No buying. Their distribution and buying operation was very small to begin with and they drew products from multiple wholesalers. This Save Mart operation does not exactly h...

I just don't see Cracker Barrel as a west coast restaurant chain. Lots of canned and frozen produce on their side dishes when we are used to the same dishes fresh here (like green beans). Reducing the menu means that the core customers will walk in and find it to be a shadow of their expectations s...

Rebranding to Save Mart will probably not go well, as the name is mostly unheard of outside the central valley, and sounds like a budget name. To someone who isn't familiar with the company, Food Maxx should be the conventional stores and Save Mart should be the discount stores. If they need a bann...