Retail Watchers

More and more Kroger brands are infiltrating Roundy's shelves. Simple Truth and Big K continue to be in plentiful supply, but today I also noticed some Private Selection items and a lot of P$$t as well...especially on the spice rack. Too bad they couldn't have dyed the labels yellow and called it &q...

Roundy's brand strikes me as ripe to be discontinued. First off, there is no store named Roundy's, is there? The only evidence I've seen of a Roundy's-branded store is the turn-of-the-century "Roundy, Peckham & Co." mock-up on The Streets of Old Milwaukee . They were a wholesaler that...

Wisconsin's grocery market is a bit...unique. Some names can be found throughout the state (Copps, Pick 'n Save, Piggly Wiggly); others are hyper-subregional. Out-of-state operators can be hyperselective: Hy-Vee is strong in Madison, but nonexistent elsewhere. Schnucks has a lone Wisconsin store in ...

Is this a picture similar to the lower hanging lights and aisle hangers? https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/copps-sun-prairie-3?select=q3KJnnshu7yHaOgmRe2Ssw Yes, it does. That picture was taken in 2012, which suggests this was actually the prevailing Roundy's remodeling trend, not a Kroger trend. It ...

Today I ventured into a different Copps from the usual: This store was on Whitney Way, and is one of the few in Madison that was built as a Copps from the outset instead of being a Kohl's conversion. It hails from the early 1990s, it directly faces a newer Hy-Vee store, and it always feels like a gh...

The last time I lived near a Ryan's, the restaurant was constantly in the news for health-code violations.

If this kind of malfeasance existed chainwide, it's a wonder if Ovation has any future at all.

I can think of one more positive change that Kroger has made: Having less of a dependency on store coupons. Until this year, Copps and Pick 'n Save were continuously littering my mailbox with direct-mail books of store coupons. They were an utter pestilence: You needed to have coupon book if you wan...

I don't think light fixtures and such closer to the floor is a Kroger thing. Has anyone else seen that? As far as I can tell these are the same fixtures that have been in the building since A&P opened it up as a Kohl's supermarket in the 1990s, so this may just be a one-off change for this part...

Remember when dedicated record store chains were a thing? I do, but it seems redundant to speak of such a concept in the plural now since there's only one chain left: Trans World, aka FYE. Ten years ago, I lived in Morgantown WV and regularly frequented the FYE store at the Morgantown Mall. Today, I...

I live in Madison. Copps is close by, it's predictable, but it's seldom my first place for groceries. After Hy-Vee opened two stores in convenient driving distance, I rarely had a reason to go to Copps again. But recently, I stepped inside the local Copps (a former A&P-built Kohl's store) for th...