What I have observed is Wal Mart drives down WinCo on price and WinCo also will drive down Wal Mart on price. In markets where both are present and competing against each other it is great. Add in Kroger and WinCo will get very aggressive on price and it can be a lot of fun. Have also seen some fun price activity between WinCo and Food Maxx in CA; funny how Save Mart will play ball on price with Food Maxx in CA.arizonaguy wrote: ↑October 25th, 2021, 5:49 pm
WinCo seems to do better in markets where they seemed to have more of an established presence prior to Walmart's entry into grocery.
They were supposed to be a force to be reckoned with in the Phoenix market (with dozens of sites purchased) but lost interest after opening only 7 stores between 2012 - 2015.
In markets where you just have one or the other, pricing is noticeably worse.
Las Vegas is another market where WinCo hasn't done much. I think this is more WinCo's strategy. They are not trying to saturate a market or blanket a market with stores. I don't think WinCo ever promised Phoenix a large number of stores; that was more of a rumor a lot of developers or analysts were running around with. I don't think they are a marketshare leader in any market, but they always have some of the highest volume stores in a given market. They are trying to open as many stores as they feel can do the volume they want to do. They have little to no debt and expand as fast as they can pay for the expansion.
I don't like WinCo much. Terrible service in the South Reno location. Bad enough to make me not want to even go there. It has worse service than Wal Mart. The store and its products are okay I guess. They are great at being in stock. I won't buy anything prepared in the store; some produce after very careful examination is as far as I go on that front. I go hoping I can get through the self checkout and not need any "assistance" - hate to bug the rude employee sitting on a stool in front of self checkout. One young employee used to be dozing off up there and asking that one for help was always a joke as it was like that one could not do anything on the system; haven't seen that one in a while. The other night they had a guy who was actually walking around the self checkouts watching people and was friendly; that is about a 1 in 20 experience.