Retail Watchers

They seem to have announced a new wave of closings today. Brooklyn Center, MN (1200 Shingle Creek Crossing) This is an 11 year old store located on the site of a former mall (Brookdale Mall) and apparently the area is a high crime area. The Target in the area closed in 2019. South Bend, IN (3701 Po...

In the Pacific Northwest, there will almost certainly be an elimination of at least one or two banners if this moves forward. It's going to be hard to justify having Fred Meyer, QFC, Haggen, Albertsons, and Safeway all remaining in the areas where all of those brands are presently in use. In the PN...

We will see what happens. Save Mart needs a deal first. Then they need to digest that deal. Save Mart's digestion of NorCal Albertsons nearly tanked the company but the people involved are all different now so we will see how this goes. Best deal they could get is the right to use some banner (be i...

I am wondering if Save Mart could roll up some of the regionals in the South too. I am thinking specifically the TX-LA-GA-AL type territory. Not going to name any names but there are a few chains I am thinking of. Cannot believe we are at a cusp of what looks like a potential major expansion for Sa...

They had not yet laid off a bunch of long term employees or done buyouts or whatever they did before COVID, when they expanded into Minneapolis. They had their A+ team to draft and send to go and open up the market (and from what I observed, they did an excellent job), but evidently the financial r...

Fresh from the farm, a new shipment of steer manure has been plopped on our favorite website, Pravda krogeralbertsons.com "The market for groceries is the latest to grab headlines for what is both normal and heathy: dynamic responses to an evolving economic landscape. Recession, inflation, and...

What will be interesting is what happens if things don't work out for Save Mart to take on a significant number of divested stores. The people running Save Mart are far too experienced to take a lousy deal like the Haggen people took. I suppose this could potentially cause Kroger to go look for &qu...

Problem with this scenario is that Kroger has a contract that says the deal is off if divestiture count exceeds 650. You're already out of the merger just releasing the Albertsons banner. I'm going to have to assume that number represents the lowest number of stores lost that make a transaction wor...

Today, I saw a "Sincerely, Albertsons" TV ad on Buzzr, a classic game show channel.

They're going to follow the 7-Eleven Speedway model to the T, except for closing Pre approval. Basically they are going to start by putting selected locations on the block and selling them to competitors either a store at a time (in surgical markets like SoCal where overlap is a mess) or in an enti...