Retail Watchers

I have not been inside a Save Mart for years, so admittedly I was unaware of how poorly they had been operating. I was under the impression that the Lucky operation was getting better and that they were adding stores. You are dead on about Stater Bros. Stater reminds me of what Save Mart used to be...

Tracy was also a Lucky. In fact the former Lucky/Albertsons is the only Save Mart-bannered store still in town; one was converted to Food Maxx and the other (a replacement for their original, much smaller Tracy location next door) is vacant, actually leaving a food desert. I think the Modesto home ...

It seems that the stores that have voted to unionize so far have all been in very blue parts of already very blue cities, so it seems that the unions are primarily targeting stores where they know they can get a majority of employees to vote in their favor. The employees have to have some kind of i...

Underperformance for all! Sephora and Ulta are adopting the same scorched earth strategy that Office Depot and Staples did a couple of decades ago. They are going to be primarily next to each other or across the street from each other. Before you generally would see Sephora in a mall and Ulta off m...

Even though these Walmart stores in these high shrink neighborhoods have aisles of locked up merchandise, the shrink is still high. One major reason is the self checkout area. Many of the people in the area are quite frankly dishonest. There are people who ring up 50 cent items and get a receipt sa...

Looking online it seems fires are more common than you'd think at Wal Mart (I would think it would never happen or be one of those once every decade type of events) but a quick search online reveals this happened at a distribution center and at least one other store within the past year.

I don't think it's a local issue. All three pharmacy chains seem to be having major issues. If you read some of the Walgreens/CVS subReddits, there are so many frustrated employee experiences almost daily. (The Rite Aid subreddit is pretty quiet, but I have seen a few locations in my area that were...

Hmm--I'm not sure I'd agree with the characterization of Aldi (house brands heavily predominant, corporate ownership, standardized operations, low costs primary, limited assortment, routinized promotions for food (German week; then 3 weeks later Italian Week, then on and on). with Grocery Outlet (f...

My Amazon Fresh has been out of the small paper bags for a couple weeks now (they are a shorter size than the ones used in the staffed checkout lanes due to the cart sensors) so they have been giving out their reusable bags for free. I had so many I brought a pile back in today and put them back in...

Save Mart should emphasize the Lucky brand. If necessary, rebrand some former Lucky stores to Lucky and bring back the old logo. You never know. A name change can do wonders to attract customers. I agree with this but considering they did quietly rebrand Santa Cruz, Monterey, etc. area from Save Ma...