Albertsons March Comp Sales up 47%

[storewanderer]

This is the biggest increase I've ever seen. I've seen some other numbers come out of some other chains, but none this high...

https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail- ... 2019-close

I think this is more of a product of the fact that Albertsons is like an oversized convenience store to many customers rather than a place to go for a full cart shop (also possible that many of their customers rarely even did full cart shops before this pandemic... opting instead to eat out a lot), and increasingly over the years Safeway has become the same way in areas where they compete against a strong Kroger operation (still lots of full carts in CA though). I am not sure if it is different at some of their divisions like United or Jewel (I suspect it may be) where more full cart shops take place. Many of these Albertsons operations seem to get a lot of small transactions, many more than a typical Kroger operation or a WinCo type store. I think with the virus what happened is they had frequent customers who typically showed up and did small shops or fill ins who now, because the restaurants were closed or they were routed to work from home, ended up going in and did full cart shops. Whether or not this continues, all depends how quickly things reopen and people either continue buying more grocery store food to prepare at home, or revert back to restaurants.

Compared to, say, Kroger, where there were already a lot of full cart shops taking place. I think there is less opportunity for a radical increase there like this as their stores already run high volumes with many large transactions.

But Albertsons has maintained reasonable store hours during this, unlike Kroger with what I consider to be unreasonable store hours at Smiths (closing at 8 PM is just too early, it isn't even dark yet now, and I do not like shopping in a crowded store in the middle of a pandemic). I know store hours alone has pushed me to shop at Safeway/Raleys more and away from Smiths even more, and my shopping there was already reduced after that fiasco joke of not accepting Visa Cards, pricing not seeming as strong as it used to be, and some items discontinued I liked to purchase. Albertsons also was running very strong ads during March and clearly aggressively going after sales (ads planned before the pandemic demand was known I suspect), but then in April the ads got really weak, at least in NorCal.

Will be really interesting to see how these numbers go going forward. At some point, given all of the hoarding, people are going to have to stop buying... it has gone on a lot longer than I thought it would.

[klkla]

This was comment from an analyst was interesting:

"Jefferies analyst Christopher Mandeville noted that Albertsons’ performance during the beginning of the pandemic eclipsed that of rival supermarket giant The Kroger Co. Other grocery retailers reporting big comp-sales gains driven by coronavirus-related business include Target, Grocery Outlet, Costco Wholesale, Ahold Delhaize USA, Loblaw, Sobeys and Metro.
“Kroger’s No. 1 conventional peer reported fourth-quarter fiscal 2019 results this a.m., showing March comps of 47%, demonstrably better than Kroger’s 30%. Four-week results as of April 25 have slowed to 21% as the stock-up effect dissipates,” Mandeville wrote in a research note on Thursday. “Albertsons continues to outpace Kroger, reinforcing our view that the latter isn’t holding its own versus scaled peers. Albertsons also mentioned a notable increase in online usage; we continue to prefer the company’s MFC [micro fulfillment center] approach versus Kroger’s CFC [central fulfillment center] strategy.”

But I agree with your analysis that this increase is probably because Kroger was already was already running higher volume stores.

[storewanderer]

I am also a little curious with the analyst comments about online fulfillment. How many Clicklist (or whatever the term is now) sites does Kroger have and how that number compares to how many Drive Up and Go sites that Albertsons has.

As I have traveled, I have seen Kroger Clicklist sites all over many of their divisions, except at Ralphs and QFC where I have not seen any. Same goes with Wal Mart. Numerous stores with grocery pick up (again micro fulfillment).

However I have seen very few "Drive Up and Go" sites at Albertsons and Safeway stores. I saw some in Boise, I know of a few around Sacramento (all of which were stores that were fulfilling Safeway.com orders for the past decade+), saw one back in MD or VA in a Safeway that was in the process of closing last year... but have not seen many. Also know of one in Elko, NV. None at any of the NV Safeways (with how poorly they run the stores, this is probably for the better until they actually start to care about running the stores here well).

My view is that Kroger has already rolled out micro fulfillment centers in hundreds of locations and has gone toward the central fulfillment strategy only after already rolling out micro fulfillment. Whereas Albertsons is still in the early stages of even rolling out micro fulfillment centers... central fulfillment is not even being talked about (need to take things one step at a time...) so I am not really sure the analyst comments are in line with the reality of the situation. It appears Kroger is doing a poor job communicating what it has already accomplished on opening hundreds or thousands of micro fulfillment centers and that after accomplishing that it is going to the central fulfillment model, and explaining that to analysts. Albertsons on the other hand is just mentioning what choice they are making now and it is clearly the fastest choice/cheapest choice to roll out quickly... but really they are just catching up with Kroger, Raleys, Wal Mart, and various other regional operators.