Retail Watchers

Aldi's Announcement said that they would be opening up to 800 new stores. I wouldn't plan on any scraps. But wasn't it noted elsewhere that includes other areas of the USA? Thus not all of those would correspond to the stores they have acquired. I guess they think they can take the various 50k squa...

Visited another 11 Stop & Shops today -- one in northern NJ and the rest in the Hudson Valley of New York (Orangeburg to Hyde Park). Some updates on what I found. The store conditions vary (both in terms of maintenance and in-stock), but generally stock is thin across the board still. Some of t...

They haven't even merged the loyalty programs together yet. They have started to move Speedway over to 7-11 IT/systems but it is a separate system for Speedway, a "copy" of sorts of the 7-11 system. They managed to get it to function the way the old Speedway Radiant system did- Chip at th...

Which makes me also wonder about those Craigslist ads... Really starting to think those were a hoax. Dirty trick either by pissed off Reddit types, pissed off landlords, or dishonest recruiters trying to convince people to jump ship. Liquidators would not do any hiring activities unless they had a ...

I see this type of thing all the time in stores. This tells you that many customers DO NOT want to go to a regular cashier. They probably don't want to deal with the superficial interaction, the hard sell for a "red card," not being able to see prices as they scan, etc. Seems quite likely...

The San Francisco Bay Area stores have very few self checkout machines. The number one Division 1 Walmart store in the Western US has 4 working self checkout machines. The store has about 8 or more staffed cash registers at busy times. The self checkout area has about 4 employees watching the self ...

Which makes me also wonder about those Craigslist ads... Really starting to think those were a hoax. Dirty trick either by pissed off Reddit types, pissed off landlords, or dishonest recruiters trying to convince people to jump ship. Liquidators would not do any hiring activities unless they had a ...

C&S could buy it, since they are unlikely to get anything in the areas S&S has (as those have ONLY Albertsons brands, no Kroger), should that go through as planned. Kroger could also buy if they wound up not buying Albertson's, for the same reasons. Hannaford is already part of the same com...

Some of the interesting stores: Aberdeen, NJ - built early 00s to replace an older acquired Grand Union in the same mall, never renovated. Holy crap this place is enormous -- over 90,000 square feet. And it could just as easily be half that. They obviously can't handle a store of that size. Stock p...

Stop & Shop is the only mainstream supermarket I can find with actual NYC stores (none in Manhattan though), and it stretches from New York City to Boston. If it's up for sale, who's gonna buy it? Albertsons (assuming no merger) can't buy it in whole unless it wants to divest a good chunk of AC...