Retail Watchers

Anyone can crudely draw a square and put “Aldi” inside of it, but I did find it interesting that Aldi is specifically mentioned on the site plan for this project in South Sacramento / Elk Grove. https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2024/05/13/windflower-farms-sustainable-housing-retail.html ...

I visited that HMart in Mira Mesa. 🤢🤢🤮🤮 It confirmed all my biases about markets in this category. 🤷‍♂️ As I've brought up before, I think any biases you might have about Hispanic oriented markets would be destroyed by that Costa Mesa Northgate. Even now it is still incredibly busy, and a heck of a...

Sounds like they sell the same crap as Five Below or the Dollar stores…only in an Asian style. They're a little different. Very little food and no cleaning or paper product type items. Over the years more and more of their product is from China but they say it is "Japan Quality." Their st...

Somehow I missed that change. What year was that? The Safeway there was a good size (I shopped there quite often). Well run store for sure and extremely busy. It is curious that they changed it to Pavilions Place, since it is was not a small store. :? If I recall correctly, Pavilions started out at...

Meanwhile one could make the argument that Kroger's continued growth of large marketplace stores is really a invasion of Target and Walmart's segments. That does add complexity because the feds don't view things that way. So the feds just see conventional supermarket industry players and share, the...

Five Below was growing exponentially until inflation hit and clobbered the dollar store industry. I have not seen a new store open in a while. I think the inflation issue along with the failure of all self checkout clobbered them, and the prospects of having to increase payroll spending by returning...

Somehow I missed that change. What year was that? The Safeway there was a good size (I shopped there quite often). Well run store for sure and extremely busy. It is curious that they changed it to Pavilions Place, since it is was not a small store. :? If I recall correctly, Pavilions started out at...

Thought I should update here. I have been to the Morena store a few more times since this started (store is the oldest in the company, also division office in the back for all of the Southwest). The first few times they were asking the customer to scan their card and pointing at the scanner but if s...

They opened a small format in Burlingame earlier this year in an old Amazon 5 Star space. I think it’s about 4,000 sq ft and they did quite a bit of work converting it. Shame they didn’t wait, the Banana Republic and Pottery Barn next door closed shortly after (although both have giant “LEASED” sig...

At least it has self checkout? I have yet to encounter a SoCal unit with self checkout... only seen that in the midwest so far. And where I saw it there was obviously older/mature locations. I find it interesting they are adding self checkout to established locations in the midwest, but not quickly...