Retail Watchers

As for the quick pull-out of Dominick's while Genuardi's was a bit slower, remember Genuardi's had C&S-based warehouses doing the work and they could survive off of that (or even the other C&S-operated warehouse that did the Safeway stores in the East). Dominick's had its own warehouse and couldn't do a slow phaseout like Genuardi's could.

storewanderer wrote: It would not surprise me if they started talking while Dominicks was in the process of closing (while other stores had already been making offers on some stores) or very shortly after. This may have motivated Safeway to hold on to more of those properties than they normally would have held on to when "exiting a market." Those empty Dominicks would be very attractive to Albertsons to help keep a competitor out that may impact Jewel and they realized this was a "silent benefit" of buying Safeway.

I don't know how much those 19 dark stores would really work though in keeping out market share, or even if they would've been still viable for grocery use. The plan might even be to sell of the higher-valued locations to pay down debt, just as they did with other divisions in the LLC days. Albertsons even renewed a lease for a Florida store (4466, I believe) prior to closing it and eventually sold it to Walmart Neighborhood Market a few years later.

Also the FTC should have studied those dark stores in Chicago and required divesting as necessary. When ABS/ASC merged in 1999 they looked at each company's development sites and even required some sites to be divested off. I feel like the FTC really rubber stamped the Albertsons/Safeway merger.

Honestly, they should've paid attention when Albertsons was selling off stores to the #1 competitors in Florida and Texas, which gave both dark stores to play with (or a monopoly). But I digress...

The reason for the rushed Dominicks closure was they wanted it off their books by the end of the year. Genuardi's had more time because they did that one in the second quarter of a year so they had a while to beat around the bush on it.

Of course there were some issues with leases and such so Dominicks was not 100% closed by the end of the year as Safeway had initially hoped/planned.

Clearly either Albertsons is willing to sell leases in Chicago or the lease expired as Fresh Thyme just signed a lease for a dead Dominick's last year.

While I am sure there was a connection between shuttering Dominick's and merging with Albertsons, don't forget Safeway realized a huge gain when it sold Safeway Canada to Sobey's. They needed a loss to offset the gain and shutting Dominick's provided them with that loss. I agree with the poster who stated the Dominick's shutdown probably made Albertsons more interested in Safeway.

Looks like Shop 'n Save is taking over the remaining 40K square feet of the South Shore Dominick's.

DNA Chicago Story

Edit: A subsequent story states that the report of Shop 'n Save taking over the lease was inaccurate. Shop & Save Market, a locally-based store, is in talks to open

New DNA Chicago Story