Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

Post by storewanderer »

Time to update this one I guess.

They did a grand opening in July. They are opening the bar (previous pharmacy area) sometimes and also filming a cooking show in the store.
https://www.f~~ebook.com/people/Sierra-Foods-Market/100065168395738/

Can't seem to link here but there is a link above others can correct to see some photos.


Not much else to report (like, any positive changes to the freshness of produce, any actual sale items in the store that aren't expired, etc.). They do still have the very below market priced meat. I am surprised it is not flying off the shelves with how cheap it is. Oh I take it back on the sale items, they have had a special on Best Yet Ice Cream at 2 for $6. I could say more but sometimes when you have nothing nic.... I will just say, I still miss Food Source.
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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

Post by storewanderer »

This store is now running some TV ads. Oh I guess that was in July, but I just noticed.

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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

Post by storewanderer »

The past couple weeks this store has had signs up that say "watch for major remodel coming Winter 2022."

I go into the store and still rarely see more than 5 customers, never see more than 1 register open, but have had some positive experiences with their meat and produce (then the next time it is not fresh again) and the cashier is always really friendly. There are also ongoing improvements to pricing, what feels like one item at a time.

This week they have posted a floor plan of the "major remodel" that is coming. They are going to cut about 35% of the space from the store. Basically the side of the store that had the tortilla room (never reopened from Food Source), deli, and bakery is being eliminated. They are going to shift bakery and deli over to the space where pharmacy was (where they currently have a bar, so not sure how that is going to impact that).

I am disappointed to see them cut the floor plan. They should have signed up with Associated Utah for their wholesaler and gotten on a legitimate ad program so they could have driven volume for the full floor space. Cutting off a side of the store and continuing with the IGA program which is basically a joke that does not do anything to drive sales and creates an unnecessary and duplicative private label situation (store has IGA Brand and Best Yet items duplicating in almost every category; makes no sense), and C&S as a wholesaler who seems to be more focused on supplying larger chains like Target. Also losing the pharmacy space which I think they should have tried to sublease to an independent pharmacy is another lost opportunity. Oh well.

Wish Marketon had taken this store over. Now, shifting the store to a weird awkward cut floorplan is going to really mess up the future path of the space.
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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

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Went to this Sierra Foods IGA store today. Since December, inventory has depleted significantly and noticed specifically the Nabisco DSD had not replenished the place, and other DSDs very slow to replenish, but they were continuing to operate as normally as they ever have. There has not been a weekly ad circular since December.

I doubt this 60,000 square foot store was even doing $10k a day of sales. Have never seen such a poorly merchandised store as this store, absolutely mind boggling this even lasted 10 months.

Still has now open signs in window and parking lot. Noticed new sign on the door- store hours starting Monday 10-7.
On second set of doors was another sign "ALL FIXTURES FOR SALE AS IS WHERE IS ASK FOR TIM." Okay. Walked into the store and the "Made in Nevada" shelves were all emptied out and nothing was left up there. The fixture sale signs were plastered all over the store including on many fixtures that still had product. Piles of equipment and other fixture sale such items such as Food Source's departmental signage were in a couple open (non merchandised) areas of the store.

There are still signs up showing the store is going to have a "major remodel" in Winter 2022 and presenting a downsized floorplan. The downsized floorplan literally just takes and cuts the store by about 35% and cuts it off at produce/frozen (which are currently in the middle of the store).

So the store is closing, very soon. They are being told the store is being remodeled, made smaller, and will reopen in 6-9 months. Not sure why it is going to take 6-9 months to do whatever it is they are going to do here and not sure why based on how this has gone the past 10 months this store in its current from as an IGA supplied by C&S is going to return for even more misery.

Center store is in awful shape and has been for a while. Many issues with outdated products (stuff that never moved from the time it was initially stocked back in April) that they try to sell at a steep discount but outdated product is outdated product and that endcap of 2 for $1 IGA salad dressing that expired in early December is not moving. Over the past couple months most SKUs of items people bought ran out of stock and the store did not replenish anything. They were using the excuse every other store is out of these items too, to anyone who complained. Well actually other stores were not out of those items (if I ran this store I would have gone to a competitor and bought items to ensure I actually had very common things like Best Foods Mayonnaise in stock...). Then again if I ran this store I wouldn't be a C&S supplied IGA either; I'd be pulling it from Associated Utah and would have a fully stocked store like all of those independents are out in Eastern Nevada. So the past few weeks in particular have been very bad as so many items the few customers who came here bought were out of stock.

It is sure tough to run an independent grocery store when you have a wholesaler who does almost nothing for you (other than pushing duplicate redundant SKUs of private label to you with Best Yet and IGA on the exact same SKUs). Couldn't ever even get them a bakery/deli program that involved a scale with ingredient labels. Their bakery deli stickers with prices were little postage stamp sized stickers someone printed out and just had a price and bar code, or handwritten price/item description on containers. Also never saw any sort of sale sign generated by the C&S shelf tag software, the entire time this place was open. They had some home made sale signs but I know the C&S software can generate sale signs... like nobody ever told them how to do it. Terrible wholesaler for a single store independent and absolutely useless IGA affiliation. Would have really thought one of these two parties- IGA or C&S- could have done something here to help get this store to operate like a standard store, but it never happened.
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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

Post by bryceleinan »

storewanderer wrote: February 26th, 2022, 6:14 pm Went to this Sierra Foods IGA store today. Since December, inventory has depleted significantly and noticed specifically the Nabisco DSD had not replenished the place, and other DSDs very slow to replenish, but they were continuing to operate as normally as they ever have. There has not been a weekly ad circular since December.

I doubt this 60,000 square foot store was even doing $10k a day of sales. Have never seen such a poorly merchandised store as this store, absolutely mind boggling this even lasted 10 months.

Still has now open signs in window and parking lot. Noticed new sign on the door- store hours starting Monday 10-7.
On second set of doors was another sign "ALL FIXTURES FOR SALE AS IS WHERE IS ASK FOR TIM." Okay. Walked into the store and the "Made in Nevada" shelves were all emptied out and nothing was left up there. The fixture sale signs were plastered all over the store including on many fixtures that still had product. Piles of equipment and other fixture sale such items such as Food Source's departmental signage were in a couple open (non merchandised) areas of the store.

There are still signs up showing the store is going to have a "major remodel" in Winter 2022 and presenting a downsized floorplan. The downsized floorplan literally just takes and cuts the store by about 35% and cuts it off at produce/frozen (which are currently in the middle of the store).

So the store is closing, very soon. They are being told the store is being remodeled, made smaller, and will reopen in 6-9 months. Not sure why it is going to take 6-9 months to do whatever it is they are going to do here and not sure why based on how this has gone the past 10 months this store in its current from as an IGA supplied by C&S is going to return for even more misery.

Center store is in awful shape and has been for a while. Many issues with outdated products (stuff that never moved from the time it was initially stocked back in April) that they try to sell at a steep discount but outdated product is outdated product and that endcap of 2 for $1 IGA salad dressing that expired in early December is not moving. Over the past couple months most SKUs of items people bought ran out of stock and the store did not replenish anything. They were using the excuse every other store is out of these items too, to anyone who complained. Well actually other stores were not out of those items (if I ran this store I would have gone to a competitor and bought items to ensure I actually had very common things like Best Foods Mayonnaise in stock...). Then again if I ran this store I wouldn't be a C&S supplied IGA either; I'd be pulling it from Associated Utah and would have a fully stocked store like all of those independents are out in Eastern Nevada. So the past few weeks in particular have been very bad as so many items the few customers who came here bought were out of stock.

It is sure tough to run an independent grocery store when you have a wholesaler who does almost nothing for you (other than pushing duplicate redundant SKUs of private label to you with Best Yet and IGA on the exact same SKUs). Couldn't ever even get them a bakery/deli program that involved a scale with ingredient labels. Their bakery deli stickers with prices were little postage stamp sized stickers someone printed out and just had a price and bar code, or handwritten price/item description on containers. Also never saw any sort of sale sign generated by the C&S shelf tag software, the entire time this place was open. They had some home made sale signs but I know the C&S software can generate sale signs... like nobody ever told them how to do it. Terrible wholesaler for a single store independent and absolutely useless IGA affiliation. Would have really thought one of these two parties- IGA or C&S- could have done something here to help get this store to operate like a standard store, but it never happened.
My mom and I had to run into Sam’s Club today, and on my way to the local Ace Hardware, drove by Sierra Foods. Parking lot was deserted, and I figured it wasn’t long for the world. Then, I saw your post…
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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

Post by storewanderer »

bryceleinan wrote: February 26th, 2022, 8:33 pm
My mom and I had to run into Sam’s Club today, and on my way to the local Ace Hardware, drove by Sierra Foods. Parking lot was deserted, and I figured it wasn’t long for the world. Then, I saw your post…
The parking lot has been deserted pretty much every time. The only time there has been any amount of traffic in the store of more than about 8 customers at once, has been when they were filming some cooking show in the store and people were seated at tables eating food. In those cases I have seen as many as 30 people in the store. However I think 90% of them ate the food and left and did not actually do any shopping in the store.

Usually lately there are only 2-3 other customers shopping at any given time.

One of the funniest things in the fixture sale was a bunch of new looking IBM cash registers and printers. Placed on the floor. Literally. Upon closer examination I believe those were Stein Mart's old cash registers. Not sure how they would have deployed those since they were not supermarket registers though. I guess it didn't matter as Raleys left all of the equipment in this store including the registers so they just kept using the old Raleys stuff.
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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

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Store started a liquidation sale a few days ago; 25% off all items. People are actually buying some fixtures too, mostly making offers, real low.

They continue to say they are downsizing the store and will reopen it in 6-9 months with all new everything. Amazing how much money they have to throw at this failure. They have a chance of success if they ditch C&S and ditch IGA and go with Associated Utah as a supplier but to reopen this same C&S supplied IGA thing that just completely failed and try it again in a smaller footprint.. how many times do you have to fail before you admit you failed?

Also not clear what happens to the employees during the 6-9 months closure. I am sure they will easily be able to find other jobs, they are great employees most of which were with Food Source for a while before this store took it over, but where does that leave this store when it tries to reopen?
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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

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Store upped liquidation sale to 30% off this past week. Still a lot of center store left and not all that different from how it has looked in this store the past 10 months. Equipment is slowly being sold off.

They are now saying they will be closed for one year, then come back with a smaller store and still be an IGA. March sounds like a terrible time to grand open a new store because you are out of the holidays, there isn't much fresh in season produce in March, and people are generally hunkered down from winter or flu season. Not sure what makes them think they will somehow be successful in a year using the supplier, IGA affiliation, and store approach they've used for the past 10 months. New equipment and a smaller footprint won't fix the problem here- the place simply didn't attract customers due to its offer/pricing/operational strategy.

C&S's CA Warehouse (must be too busy supplying Target and Kroger to care) and IGA were zero help to any of what was needed to make this successful. These wholesalers that do not help the independent grocer compete with a promotion program and legitimate perimeter program really frustrate me. I don't know why this is so common with the California-based warehouses of these national wholesalers. Somehow the same wholesaler/affiliation group in other parts of the US can have a legitimate program going that helps the independent stores build volume and compete, but in California... the wholesalers seem to just slot in an odd mix of items at absurdly high pricing, missing private label in key categories like milk, no ad program, no perimeter programs... too bad.
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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

Post by bryceleinan »

storewanderer wrote: March 12th, 2022, 11:59 pm Store upped liquidation sale to 30% off this past week. Still a lot of center store left and not all that different from how it has looked in this store the past 10 months. Equipment is slowly being sold off.

They are now saying they will be closed for one year, then come back with a smaller store and still be an IGA. March sounds like a terrible time to grand open a new store because you are out of the holidays, there isn't much fresh in season produce in March, and people are generally hunkered down from winter or flu season. Not sure what makes them think they will somehow be successful in a year using the supplier, IGA affiliation, and store approach they've used for the past 10 months. New equipment and a smaller footprint won't fix the problem here- the place simply didn't attract customers due to its offer/pricing/operational strategy.

C&S's CA Warehouse (must be too busy supplying Target and Kroger to care) and IGA were zero help to any of what was needed to make this successful. These wholesalers that do not help the independent grocer compete with a promotion program and legitimate perimeter program really frustrate me. I don't know why this is so common with the California-based warehouses of these national wholesalers. Somehow the same wholesaler/affiliation group in other parts of the US can have a legitimate program going that helps the independent stores build volume and compete, but in California... the wholesalers seem to just slot in an odd mix of items at absurdly high pricing, missing private label in key categories like milk, no ad program, no perimeter programs... too bad.
I don't get why Dave hasn't seen the writing on the wall with IGA as a supplier.
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Re: Food Source (Raleys) closing Reno, NV

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bryceleinan wrote: March 14th, 2022, 7:41 pm
I don't get why Dave hasn't seen the writing on the wall with IGA as a supplier.
They seem to be particularly proud of the IGA affiliation (too bad it means nothing). They have papers in the store they typed up "what is IGA" and talking up it being the world's largest supermarket chain and "local farmers supporting local families." These were all typed up at the store level there in the Sierra Foods and printed with a photocopier in black and white, it isn't even color glossy professionally created materials provided by IGA.

I do wonder if C&S was the only wholesaler willing to work with them... maybe UNFI and Associated Utah passed? Would have thought any wholesaler would have been drooling over getting a 60k square foot store to supply...
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