Retail Watchers

Grocery Outlet reports a Q1 loss due to transition issues including its inventory system.

https://chainstoreage.com/grocery-outle ... ion-issues

I buy less and less there each week... I still go into multiple locations multiple times a week to look around...

I am just not finding items I'm interested in nearly as often as I was before. And I am "passing" on more and more items because their price is too high (I can get it on sale for less at Smiths, Safeway, WinCo, or even Raleys sometimes).

Grocery outlet has always been a treasure hunt store for me. You never know what you will find. I really enjoy walking through there and seeing all the failed products end up on the shelves there and shaking my head how those products made it past multiple rounds of review in each company. They have some deals but it's hard to make GO part of a regular, weekly shopping excursion.

babs wrote: ↑May 9th, 2024, 10:04 am Grocery outlet has always been a treasure hunt store for me. You never know what you will find. I really enjoy walking through there and seeing all the failed products end up on the shelves there and shaking my head how those products made it past multiple rounds of review in each company. They have some deals but it's hard to make GO part of a regular, weekly shopping excursion.

Sometimes, it just depends on what individual tastes are. Since there will always be a limited number of people doing those reviews, they may be people who enjoy the item(s) in question while others don't.

There is also an issue where companies/stores may pull items too quickly if they don't sell immediately, where if they were given a bit of time they could actually become more popular.

Took a harder look at the nursery in Grocery Outlet.

They have plants from 3 providers:

25% or so Cal Color- these plants do not look good. Package sizes are weird and they are just sloppy.

20% or so Bonnie - little plants in clear plastic cups (what happened to the old compostable cups they always used that you could plant directly into the ground)? This looked fully stocked and these looked good, like the vendor just serviced them.

55% Van Wingerden of Blaine, WA - these plants were rather expensive but these looked fantastic. They were in generous sized containers, even their 6 pack (which was actually an 18 pack but cost 19.99 ouch) was bigger sizes than any other 6 packs I've ever seen. Great looking plants.

So I guess this WA provider is who they got to source out here to NV, instead of CO as they did last year. Or maybe the CO vendor will show up later. In any case the stuff from the WA provider is fantastic quality.