Retail Watchers

I think the 40% franchisee Chilis is dated information. They spent a lot of time the past ~10 years buying out franchisees and converting back to corporate stores. They did this even during COVID. I think they did this for a lot of the reasons you bring up such as pricing consistently and also for ...

So Trader Joe's has announced 17 new stores in just the last 6 weeks. Many more on the way, and if you look at their website I see several of these must be intended to bleed sales off older, overloaded stores nearby. They seem to be very seriously adding real estate as fast as they can, thankfully a...

They are aggressively trying to address the overloaded locations. I suspect that after many years of just adding staff they're realizing with rising labor costs that it is just plain inefficient to keep throwing absurd amounts of labor at one store that is so busy it requires a full stocking crew du...

Dom's and Foxtrot Markets have abruptly closed permanently.

One handwritten sign left by workers said "not a joke" and "$180,000,000 in the hole."

https://chicago.eater.com/2024/4/23/241 ... ty-closing

Safeway in Northern California luckily is still open until Midnight. Some are open until 2 AM. A small number are open 24 hours. Lucky is mostly open until 11 PM except for the Lucky stores in really bad areas such as Oakland. Those close at 10 PM, but are very rare. Sprouts is open until 10 PM. Gr...

Thinking about it, from reading this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RiteAid/comments/1ca2ty8/do_any_stores_of_the_future_still_exist_today/. Was the Rite Aid on Fair Lane in Placerville slated to get the store of the future remodel in 2020 or 21?? First off, their "store of the future&q...

How can this chain survive with stores that look like this? What is going on here? These are busy stores. I went into a couple obviously not busy stores that did not quite look this bad. Those stores look like newer stores. This was a lot older store that is now closed, but when I went a few months...

Chili's and Fridays have been closing stores for years and just announced a new round of closings. Applebee's continues to close stores and seems destined to become a mostly small market operation, at best. Denny's has had several rounds of closures---I think they benefited, over time, by the decli...

My Asian in-laws wouldn't set foot in a Ralphs if they were giving everything away. For some reason the brand has done very poorly with the Asian community and is strongly disliked. I'm unsure as to why. I was surprised my nieces had never been to a Ralphs in their life. Albertsons has done much bet...

I've never seen a Michaels close after a a Hobby Lobby opens. They are next door to each other all over SoCal and have been for a while now. Both chains have diverged quite a bit, Hobby Lobby has a fraction of the arts and crafts merchandise it did 15 years ago when they started the western expansi...