storewanderer wrote: ↑April 23rd, 2024, 10:33 pm
Looking closely at pricing in your photos I think they have a pricing problem. While their pricing looks great to me since I am so used to the terrible Northern California prices I see most often, Market Basket is a very difficult competitor and I don't think they are competitive with them on mix or price and that is a problem.
The chain may have reached a tipping point where too many of the stores are not profitable so they can no longer use the profitable ones to prop up the problem stores. It will be interesting to see what happens. They may need to get out of MA entirely and give the few stores that do okay to Hannaford to take over. NJ should be fixable... is the competition there really that strong?
I'll have to get into that website with the trip stats. That puts the very slow Save Mart around 600 customers per day. They are open 16 hours per day so average about 40 customers per hour. Transaction sizes are not large there either. Sounds about right. 55k square foot store; service meat/pharmacy are closed; bakery had been closed for about 5 years but was recently reopened. Deli is about 1/2 merchandised with one clerk. Usually has about 5 employees working total in the store during the day- 1 cashier, 1 deli, 1 meat, 1 manager (who goes around stocking or being second cashier), and 1 in bakery.
Market Basket is a very tough competitor, and yes, they beat Stop & Shop on both mix and price. But I haven't been to a Massachusetts S&S in around a year, and I'm not sure whether they run different pricing in different states. (Food Trade News' Grocery Industry Directory says there's an office in Purchase, NY that runs the southern stores; the Quincy, MA ones run the northern stores, but I can't confirm that elsewhere.) I doubt they'd get out of MA entirely, though, since that's their home state and there's still a significant amount of western MA where S&S is but MB is not. Still, Hannaford runs excellent stores with much better pricing than S&S, so that would definitely be an upgrade.
NJ is strange because it has lots of supermarkets (and, in some areas, lots of independents) but basically only one mainstream chain that matters in northern NJ -- ShopRite, of course. Stop & Shop and ACME each have their own presence in north Jersey, Weis has a couple scattered stores, and then there are others like Foodtown in a few places, but ShopRite is the only one with a meaningful presence. And ACME is very strong in much of southern NJ, but in central and northern NJ, their stores are scattered, smaller, and lower-volume. ShopRite is completely dominant in north and central Jersey. Even so, their price advantage over their competitors is slimmer than it used to be -- when I do my own price comparison every couple weeks, Stop & Shop, ACME, and ShopRite are rarely more than a couple dollars away from each other (in no particular order, it seems to change every week for the different lists I do). To my surprise, Wegmans has been pretty consistently beating all three on a regular basis.
Northern New Jersey has been a victim of consolidation and bankruptcies. 30 years ago, north Jersey had ACME, Foodtown, Grand Union, ShopRite, A&P, Edwards, and Pathmark, all competing. the market lost most Foodtowns (
Twin County Grocers) and, subsequently, the Foodtown stores that didn't close outright largely became A&P or Edwards. Grand Union went under in 2001, and S&S took on most of those stores, around the same time they converted all the Edwards. A&P bought Pathmark in 2007, and by that point, ACME had mostly left north Jersey. 2015 comes and A&P goes under, splitting the stores mostly between ACME and S&S. They each close some random stores around the state over the next 9 years, but don't really open any new ones. Foodtown continues its decline, although lately they've found success in New York City. Meanwhile, ShopRite is aggressively adding new stores and replacing older stores with consistently high-volume locations until there's barely any place left for another mainstream competitor, both literally (in terms of land availability) and figuratively (in terms of market demand). ACME and Stop & Shop both seem to do just fine -- although I question S&S -- but the bottom line is they hang on. But I wouldn't consider either a major competitor at the scale of ShopRite. Stop & Shop spent enormous amounts of money building giant stores in the area maybe 20 years ago, but in my opinion they haven't kept those stores up over the years and so a lot of them are dated and just feel kind of dead these days.
Here's the thing: I'm against the Kroger/Albertsons merger for the big-picture reasons, but I wouldn't be opposed to somebody with deeper pockets and a different strategy taking over ACME. The Kroger stores I've seen elsewhere in the country would easily be viable competitors against ShopRite. I assumed Stop & Shop might fill that role, but their execution is not great and I'm not seeing any real strategy from them, so I don't know what they're up to.
A side note: the specialty supermarket scene in New Jersey is booming. We've got natural supermarkets, Asian supermarkets, Caribbean supermarkets, Italian supermarkets, Middle Eastern supermarkets, gourmet markets, and everything else like that all over the place. But as for the mainstream stores? It seems like it's just impossible to beat or even come close to ShopRite on their home turf.
