Quite a few of them did continue as supermarkets into the 00's though. Many of the ones that went to Albertsons did end up closed but I think there are still a few open like Santa Maria. I am not really sure if those store failures are a reflection on the stores or on how Albertsons ran things into the ground. Also a handfull that went to Ralphs/F4L remain open. And there is that Vons in Grover Beach that was a Smiths, an excellent high volume store. I suspect they overpaid big time for the locations.klkla wrote: ↑March 8th, 2020, 2:50 pmOnly about a third of their stores were viable. The others failed for one reason: Crappy real estate!storewanderer wrote: ↑March 7th, 2020, 11:15 pm They opened stores that were too big and could not pull the sales volumes they needed. They pulled good volumes, higher than other stores in CA were pulling, but they were too low given the size of the stores was simply too large. They did go with a scaled down store size by the mid 90's but by then they were in way too deep. Lucky and Vons fought them pretty hard on price.
Somewhere I have the property auction book from when they sold off the stores.