pseudo3d wrote: ↑March 8th, 2019, 12:27 pm
After this last year hearing the shenanigans Kroger has pulled across its divisions (and continues to pull), this shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone. They also have heavily pushed ClickList (now just "Kroger Pickup") complete with departments within stores and special parking lots, whereas H-E-B and Albertsons only seem to have done it with high-volume, renovated, and new stores, yet I never see anyone using Kroger's.
This really varies by market. Hardly any Ralphs have ClickList. In my market 2 of 6 Smiths have it. It gets pretty good use at one store and not so much use at the other store (but some use).
Anyone who has followed my postings knows I have been a big fan of Kroger for years now as they started to make some small positive moves 15 years ago by getting more competitive on price and kept making really positive moves on mix, pricing, operations, and private label for quite a few years since then. I have always been critical of their general lack of new store growth on the west coast (Ralphs, Fred Meyer, and QFC). But they did a great job building volume in the existing stores over the past decade and they've done a lot of really nice new Marketplace stores in various other markets (AZ, UT, and all those Kroger banner divisions in the midwest). It is just since the old CEO Dillon retired, they have really moved in a different direction...
The past few years have just been weird. Purchase of excellent operators Mariano's and Harris Teeter yet I see zero things from either of those chains in the other Kroger banners. Both of them have excellent fresh departments which is an area where I find Kroger to be below average (specifically bakery and deli) yet for some reason Kroger does not seem to be taking successful high quality good tasting programs from those two divisions and implementing them in the other divisions selectively as they should be.
Then there is all this digital stuff... for a company that couldn't even get e-commerce going with Fred Meyer 15 years ago suddenly now wants to become very into this whole e-commerce thing. Even bankrupt retailers like Toys R Us, Shopko, Kmart, Sears had e-commerce efforts. Fred Meyer just last year finally got an e-commerce thing going and it doesn't have even 1/10 of the SKUs that a full line Fred Meyer store carries. Kroger had a good chance to build up e-commerce slowly but missed that opportunity.