Retail Watchers

I don't know when it happened since I don't live there anymore, but at some point it appears that almost all of the Denny's restaurants in the Seattle/Tacoma area returned to full 24 hour operation. There are only 3 Denny's locations near here, all with different hours. The one closest to here in G...

Home Depot and Lowe's have decimated the nursery industry, and now they have horrible quality at horrible prices since they have a duopoly in many areas. There are still some chains left like Armstrong in SoCal but they have skewed to more premium quality plants that don't really compete with the o...

“To-go” requires packaging, which costs more nowadays, especially because foam containers are verboten in many areas of the country. Dine in requires none of that packaging. As to “checked luggage”, certain items “disappear” from checked luggage frequently as it is checked-like electronic devices. A...

And the seagulls swoop down and take the food from the rats!

Another beautiful day in the OAK.

Shall we talk about Walgreens and Village Medical?

You can find things at an Ace store that you can’t find at the Blue and Orange boxes. There is also more help there than the big boxes. Plus a lot of people prefer going to a smaller store than dealing with the hordes in the big box DIYs .

A lot of Fry’s stores seem to be dumpier nowadays….dirty floors, out-of-stock during weekends, more disheveled looking. Meanwhile the Safeways where I live are brighter and cleaner looking- produce department looks good, bakery looks tempting, deli well stocked.

I wonder why the Australian government hasn’t forced divestitures on these two operators. They do have Aldi down there, how much of a market share does Aldi have?
Is there any interest for other International retailers to get into Oz? Like the Japanese retailers? Costco?

I think this change was made in an attempt to sway public opinion. Most people don't understand the details, all they see is that the number of divested stores went from 413 to 579. That looks like a big increase, so people will think that Kroger is being reasonable and addressing the government's ...