My mother's family is from PA, about 90 minutes northwest of the Sunbury, PA Weis HQ. Your description of Weis is accurate based on what I have experienced over the years. Conservative operator with a focus on small to mid size places but stay away from major metropolitan areas unless they are in the core central PA Weis operating area. The out of state moves down my way (I'm outside Washington, DC) that Weis has made have been to areas with a more rural feel consistent with their PA operating area. When Weis has historically tried to enter major metros they have not been successful. In the late 1980s Weis tried to expand into the western Northern Virginia suburbs and Montgomery County MD. They got absolutely destroyed by Giant-MD and mostly closed the stores by the early 1990s. Weis does still have a long time store in Damascus, MD in Montgomery County but that area still has the rural, agricultural feel of Central PA, not suburban Maryland. Weis also has had stores in the Baltimore suburbs going back to the 1970s. These stores in in more blue collar, working class areas not unlike their clientele in PA. It is only recently that Weis seems to have broadened their offerings to be more like a traditional mid-line grocer. Their newer builds and remodels seem much less "country" in feel and don't seem like "that grocery store from PA" if you know what I mean.marketreportblog wrote: ↑November 25th, 2023, 6:23 pm Now onto Weis strategy. If the buyer is in fact Weis, I think your assessment is spot on. I would not at all be surprised if they were interested in acquiring many of those former Big V and current SRS stores, and possibly others, to expand their presence into the Hudson Valley and Capital Region. They strike me as a fairly conservative operator -- they don't seem to take a lot of risks, they seem to figure out what they're good at and really nail it -- but they also strike me as an operator with some serious strategy, perhaps more so than someone like Stop & Shop which seems to be coasting.
With all that said, Weis did purchase a large amount of cast off Food Lion stores from the Ahold-Delhaize merger. This brought them into a wide variety of areas from rural to suburban in places like the far western and southern suburbs of Northern Virginia, back to Montgomery County Maryland, new to PG County Maryland, Western Maryland and the Maryland Eastern Shore as well as the Delaware beaches. There have been a few closures here and there but for the most part it seems that Weis has been successful with these stores. In a sense, the Food Lion purchase did fill in the gaps between the clusters of stores they have had around Maryland close to the PA border. Given this purchase, it wouldn't seem out of bounds for Weis to be looking at buying a cluster of stores elsewhere if they thought their formula could work there. I will say that I was surprised to read that Weis took out a loan for possible store purchases. I had always thought that Weis was mostly debt free and was aiming to stay that way.
Also, on the topic of Shop Rite, Wakefern started opening Price Rite stores around the DC area about five or so years ago. However, they have now closed all of those stores. I had wondered if the Price Rite stores were an initial entry into the market that would later include regular Shop Rite stores if anything became available. With the departure of the Price Rite stores, it looks like there is no longer interest in the DC market. I had always wondered if Shop Rite would make a play on divested stores in the DC area from the Kroger-Albertsons deal beyond the 10 stores C&S is buying. Also, the Shop Rite stores in Calverton and Glen Burnie, MD have closed. Both stores were owned by coop members not Wakefern itself. Perhaps the DC market is just outside of Shop Rite's expertise. I have always thought that a large format, upscale Shop Rite operator would have the potential to do well in the DC area. However, they would need scale since the stores would be a physical outlier in the Shop Rite system much like the stores that are closing in Albany.