Family Fresh Foods Hudson, WI
Posted: November 9th, 2019, 12:36 am
I happened upon this store in Hudson, WI. Pulling in, the place looked real shabby. Few cars in the lot, chipped paint on the building, etc. Upon walking up, I noticed the closed pharmacy then saw signs on the door that said store closing all items some percentage off.
Walked into the store and went over toward the pharmacy side first. The store looked a lot better inside, than outside. But still looked like a store from about a decade ago inside. It was a nice, big, pretty high quality store. Tough to comment on merchandising when the shelves are about 25% stocked and employees are packing items up in boxes as you are walking through. Pricing seemed pretty high (a lot higher than Cub or Hy Vee closer to Minneapolis). Looking through I saw Our Family private label items.
I got over to the fresh departments (which were pretty much all closed) last. This part of the store was extremely nice looking. It had different flooring and lighting than the rest of the store. Giant (empty/closed) service meat counter. Giant deli. Salad bar. Caribou Coffee kiosk and attached seating area which was also quite nice. Still had limited produce and bakery.
I wonder what happened with this store? Given the giant fresh departments, it must have done quite well in the past. They were using generic Our Family plastic bags but looking at the receipt it appears this is a corporate Spartan Nash operation. I know Nash Finish (I mean Finch) ran pretty lousy retail operations with a tract record of failure (will never forget their Avanza joke in Denver) but am not sure how Spartan did on that end of the business.
Walked into the store and went over toward the pharmacy side first. The store looked a lot better inside, than outside. But still looked like a store from about a decade ago inside. It was a nice, big, pretty high quality store. Tough to comment on merchandising when the shelves are about 25% stocked and employees are packing items up in boxes as you are walking through. Pricing seemed pretty high (a lot higher than Cub or Hy Vee closer to Minneapolis). Looking through I saw Our Family private label items.
I got over to the fresh departments (which were pretty much all closed) last. This part of the store was extremely nice looking. It had different flooring and lighting than the rest of the store. Giant (empty/closed) service meat counter. Giant deli. Salad bar. Caribou Coffee kiosk and attached seating area which was also quite nice. Still had limited produce and bakery.
I wonder what happened with this store? Given the giant fresh departments, it must have done quite well in the past. They were using generic Our Family plastic bags but looking at the receipt it appears this is a corporate Spartan Nash operation. I know Nash Finish (I mean Finch) ran pretty lousy retail operations with a tract record of failure (will never forget their Avanza joke in Denver) but am not sure how Spartan did on that end of the business.