Retail Watchers

Kmart gave up long ago on trying to train their employees to provide good customer service. It is due to a lack of proper training. They hire employees at low wages and they don't last long. The employees really aren't taught much. They basically learn how to run a register and return items. They ne...

Perhaps they want to sell as much stuff as they can at full price to make the most profit.

I wonder why they don't just ship all of the stuff in the store to other Albertsons stores.

San Francisco has passed so many laws to make it hard to do business there. The minimum wage in San Francisco has been set to a very high amount. Also businesses with more than a certain number of employees have to provide health care to their employees or pay the city a health care fee. San Francis...

Rite Aid has sold all 7 of their San Francisco stores to Walgreens. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/02/02/daily86.html San Francisco is dominated by Walgreens. There is only 1 Longs Drugs in San Francisco and it opened only a short time ago. I think Rite Aid is slowly giving up....

The original acquisition in August of 2007, included 109 Wild Oats locations. Thirty-five of those, under the Henry’s and Sun Harvest banners, were sold immediately to Smart & Final. Whole Foods then closed several of the locations and had converted several others to the Whole Foods banner. I wo...

The truth is that there are nicer Lucky stores in the Bay Area. For example, the Pleasant Hill Lucky. That store is surprisingly well kept. The Safeway across the street from that one is a dumpy Safeway and is poorly stocked. After 5 PM, it looks like vultures have cleaned out the bread aisle. In th...

This is unfortunate. I first heard about Gottschalks when a new store opened up across the street from where I lived at college. I found that the store was sort of like a mini-Macy's. It was expensive, but it was the only department store in all of Davis. I don't know who would buy all or part of th...

They might want to set up their new headquarters in the old Mervyn's headquarters and restart the chain from there. However, it will take a lot of money and ingenuity to restart an entire department store chain from scratch. If I were them I would start off with just one store. They should open one ...

Whole Foods is supposed to sell the store. It will continue operate as a supermarket, but under new owners. I don't know who would operate it. I assume it will be another organic grocer, but it could be a regular chain store. Maybe, Vons might want it. However, if it becomes a regular supermarket, m...

In the Southland Mall case, that Lucky was so old that they decided not to renew the lease. That old store would have needed major repairs. The floor was in terrible condition. That one did not get much business because it was so old and small. Spending tons of money to fix a tiny store would not be...