Retail Watchers

How many Walmart customers really have a choice outside large or mid sized cities? In the small towns where Walmart still has the bulk of their stores they have run out most everyone else who could provide them with some competition and potentially a better shopping experience. In large and mid siz...

Advance Auto Parts has no standalone stores in California. The only other states they have no presence in are Montana, Alaska, and Hawaii. In the meantime, California is one of Pep Boys' best states as far as location count. https://www.scrapehero.com/store/product/advance-auto-parts-store-locations...

I live fairly close to a pretty excellent Target in a solidly middle-class area in first-ring Detroit...their food offerings are amazingly good--I always compliment the food staff there because they do a great job. Other stores in the area should take lessons. Just had a delivery order sent with so...

I always assumed retailers that install self-checkout do so under the calculation that the potential for shrink is huge, but that they will still come out ahead versus the labor expense of having only staffed terminals.

(they are also quick to reduce the price of slow-moving items, while with Aldi, it seems to be a rarity). I've read that that varies a lot by individual store. My local Aldi constantly does markdowns of 5-20% or so on slow-moving or oversupplied items by placing handwritten price tags on the shelve...

storewanderer wrote: ↑January 16th, 2021, 11:34 am
I have seen Aldi in a number of towns of perhaps 30,000 people. I don't know how small they go.

Within their primary footprint in the eastern half of the US, Aldi is in many cities of 10,000-20,000 people. For the most part, they don't seem to go much lower than a population of about 7,000.

I enjoy shopping at Aldi and have shifted to doing the majority of my grocery shopping there in the six years since they arrived in my city. However, the key to understanding Aldi is that Aldi was never intended to fully replace shopping at a traditional grocer. They are founded primarily on being s...

If you consume a quantity of MSG in excess of what would normally be found in foods, you very well could have an adverse reaction, but that's true of many otherwise safe ingredients. Still, in the 50 years since MSG became "controversial," no rigorous scientific study has ever been able to...

MSG being harmful or unhealthy is a myth founded upon what was probably meant to be a satirical or humorous correspondence letter (i.e. not an actual scientific study) in the New England Journal of Medicine. The reason why most doctors would have taken such a letter as humor is that MSG is simply a ...

IMO, the biggest problem with Walmart this past decade is that instead of having much of a response to Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, Aldi, and Lidl, Walmart’s management has been trying to position Walmart as an alternative to Target or Amazon. Nobody really associates Walmart strongly...