Re: United Supermarkets opens in Pecos
Posted: November 13th, 2020, 11:11 pm
I think another part of that problem was Safeway got more competitive on price in the mid 90's period. In the late 90's in NorCal I don't think Lucky was any cheaper than Safeway. Lucky certainly put out a good punch and ran a good store with some good deals on ad though, they were more than competitive overall but there were certainly cheaper stores around (F4L, etc.).klkla wrote: ↑November 13th, 2020, 7:37 pm
Yes. That is it and it's a real phenomenon. In the 1990's Lucky, which was known by all Californians as The Low Price Leader, tried to make their image a little more upscale. They spent a fortune remodeling virtually every store and initiated a new ad campaign to reinforce their new image called The Other Side of Lucky. It was a huge failure and they tried to walk it back but the damage was already done and their stock price fell to a point where Albertson's was able to make an opportunistic takeover of the company.
However I don't think that had anything to do with why the ASC company was sold to Albertsons... Lucky was not considered a distressed asset at the time of sale, only Acme was. The ASC company seemed to have well run divisions (other than Acme) but was a mismanaged parent extracting profit out of its divisions and not investing back into them properly but did have plenty of money to build a skyscraper in downtown Salt Lake City, UT despite having no real stores anywhere in sight (the closest store was a Sav-On in Elko, NV) other than a small short lived thing called "American Store" in the bottom of their skyscraper.