Interesting that they remodeled the Rosslyn store. I wondered if it would survive as it hadn't super busy the couple times I was there. It also has an awkward layout. I don't recall all the specifics but it was clearly merchandised in an odd way when I was there before, perhaps reflecting their loca...

Quite a few of the more viable A&Ps went to independents like Butera. I lived near one of their stores that easily could have replaced two small Jewels or a much smaller Dominick's (which was a former Kroger). The smaller Nationals, at least in Chicago proper, seemed to become Walgreen's Pete's has ...

Looking at the addresses of their other Business Center locations, at least some are in areas that don't seem like retail hotspots. I would imagine, though, that they are close to other businesses that supply unglamorous services and products, which would be where you expect to find something that d...

there's nothing really new about this, regionally or otherwise. Kroger did this in a lot of their early Greenhouse stores. They called it Barney's Cafe and some of these Barney's had their own outside entrances. Unfortunately, they were selling stuff like Kroger's subpar fried chicken and deli produ...

Ingle's seems to have had a strategy of staying out of Atlanta and its inner suburbs---I think they spunoff those locations when they bought the Bruno's operations. I think the closest-in store used to be one in Tucker. If anything, they seem to have receded more to the periphery over time and I'm s...

They're really banking on high end malls outside the US. They will have a limited number of places where this would work here. The model is probably small boutique-ish operations like Jacques Torres in NYC, but that would have to deliver on really unqiue products (which Torres does) to make this work.

This is the Palisades neighborhood which is relatively isolated from the rest of the city and nowhere near Georgetown. It's probably closer to existing Safeways in Bethesda than ones DC. This store probably dates from the 40s and, among other things, Safeway has wanted to prevent another grocery fro...

Sears was seen by the financial community as stagnating roughly from the 70s onward. The"softer side" campaign helped for awhile, but basically the floundered. The catalog became a money loser, but they killed it just as direct mail merchandising began its comeback, even before the web. They wasted ...

Harris-Teeter is kind of joke as a high end operator and I suspect Kroger in their current efforts to homogenized their operations will make this even more so. Publix, which is no Whole Foods, plays the part better.

PriceRite isn't a low income neighborhood format--the typical store is an older, usually smaller one in an inner ring suburb with a low/middle to middle income profile. The stores they have in the DC area fit that profile and the one in Woodbridge has a large immigrant base to which they have been a...