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Re: Safeway closures

Posted: September 12th, 2020, 12:40 am
by storewanderer
pseudo3d wrote: September 12th, 2020, 12:02 am
Well, the Market Street concept was born under the Miller administration. I was thinking of a format that would introduce more general merchandise options, like hardware or apparel (the latter being experimented by Hy-Vee). It's doubtful that they'll go anywhere close to the "Kroger Marketplace" model but they could always play around with concepts (on that note, Albertsons did keep Monte Mart, a mid-1970s acquisition, as a full-service operation for several years after acquisition, and by the time it was divested in '99, one of the old Monte Mart stores was their biggest stores at 100k+ square feet).

Or just focus on improving the weaker markets, like Colorado or Texas.
Monte Mart was a discount format (self bagging). The Safeway in Del Rey Oaks (which was divested to Ralphs and may have briefly ran as FoodsCo or closed immediately for a remodel to Ralphs in 1999) was that "big" Monte Mart but I don't think it was 100k square feet. Also the FoodsCo in Salinas was a Monte Mart, divested to Ralphs in 1999, and has operated under that format since then. I guess these two stores would have been in Albertsons old NorCal division pre-1999. There was a Monte Mart in West Sacramento in the 70's or 80's as well.

Albertsons SoCal Division still had some Monte Marts including one in Hanford (this store opened around 1992- it was a big giant warehouse store) well into the 00's. They had Monte Mart, Max, and Super Saver all under a single ad format/program but over time closed most of the stores before ultimately converting the few that stayed open to the Lucky name.

Re: Safeway closures

Posted: September 13th, 2020, 8:41 am
by TW-Upstate NY
Super Saver originated on the east coast I'm going to say sometime in the 60's and was an Acme banner and apparently Albertson's got the rights to it when they acquired Acme.

Re: Safeway closures

Posted: September 13th, 2020, 11:15 am
by storewanderer
Yes, Super Saver came back in the 90's due to the lawsuit between ASC and Price Club over the use of the Price Advantage banner in California. The 90's CA logo was the old Acme era logo, re-colored. Then Albertsons re-did the logo and brought the name back in 2004 or whenever for a "high volume discount" format mostly in TX/FL and we know what happened to that. The last California Super Saver was closed in Woodland by LLC shortly after they took operations in NorCal. The FoodsCo in Pittsburg, CA is a former Super Saver and is a good example of what the Super Saver Stores in NorCal were: stripped out conventional stores that were too small for a discount format. The SoCal Super Savers developed by ASC were mostly new builds and rather nice, but did not last long under Albertsons (Indio, Anahem, there were a couple others).

Maybe we need to throw these last few posts to a different thread.