DFW Tom Thumb/Albertsons/MArket Street Observations

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storewanderer
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Re: DFW Tom Thumb/Albertsons/MArket Street Observations

Post by storewanderer »

pseudo3d wrote: May 16th, 2022, 5:20 pm


Homeland, like other Safeway spinoffs, had major debt problems that led to its downfall. AWG had been involved with Homeland since 1995 when it bought some stores and the DC, then continued to supply the stores until Homeland went bankrupt and bought the stores entirely (in 2002). While Albertsons could probably go back and buy HAC (Homeland Acquisition Group) there would be two major problems, one, its employee-owned, and two, there's just too many small and out of date stores that wouldn't be very competitive.

Texas is also growing but Albertsons hasn't been very responsive in new stores, and while they've made piecemeal updates in DFW and parts north, the Austin and Houston markets are almost completely neglected.
I think there is something with Homeland that requires them to use AWG as a supplier basically forever. They are still very much hitched to AWG, even if not owned by AWG. I am not sure how that would go in a sale. There was a time I thought Homeland would be a good acquisition for Kroger but based on how Kroger has gone and how Kroger handles rural markets I no longer think that would work very well. Albertsons would be an improvement over Homeland in most/every way but carry many of the same issues (especially pricing).

At this point in time Homeland has dumped most of the bad stores (former Safeway units) and has a number of pretty nice stores (those are all former Albertsons units) that are positioned relatively well. Some of the former Safeway units are still not in good shape and don't appear to be positioned very well but new competition is tough to find in rural markets in Oklahoma and they do enough business to survive. Homeland did some really nice remodels to a few of their better stores (all former Albertsons...) right before AWG transitioned them to employee owned but since then has scaled back the remodel program to a much lower end/cheap looking package but it is better than nothing as the stores need work desperately.

Fun fact about Homeland- in 2021 they opened their first new build store. The store in OKC at Lincoln and 36th is the first ever store build by Homeland. All of their other stores are hand downs from others.

I found it interesting Homeland did not end up with Reasors in Tulsa.
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