WD Issues

Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. No non-grocery posts.
wnetmacman
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Re: WD Issues

Post by wnetmacman »

storewanderer wrote: February 9th, 2021, 6:10 pm It seems like in general WD in FL is a bit nicer than the rest of WD.

I remember looking at photos of those LA Stores when they announced the sale to Super 1 and they looked awful. I think most of WD in LA, AL, and probably GA is similar to that. They did have one nice store in Birmingham.
Brookshire really put some elbow grease in the 7 stores they reopened. I know in several the tile floor was removed, walls scraped down and refloated, and all the checkstands completely replaced. They really made for some nicer stores. Brookshire is pretty good at polishing turds, so to speak. In some, they even replaced some refrigeration. Eunice and Abbeville had more time, as there were already operating Super 1 Foods stores in those towns; they really did more there. Rayne, Crowley and Franklin had a good amount of work done. Breaux Bridge was the one they had to do the least to, as it had been the 2007 remodeled pastel store. I haven't been in New Roads, and New Iberia did not reopen as Super 1.
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Re: WD Issues

Post by pseudo3d »

cjd wrote: February 9th, 2021, 6:16 pm
pseudo3d wrote: February 8th, 2021, 4:59 am One thing I've noticed about Winn-Dixie is, and this could just be the overall nature of the stores and a lack of effort since the Marketplace days, but most of the chains out there (Kroger, Albertsons, H-E-B, Publix, etc.) have developed their stores to be a jack of all trades, you can have a somewhat dated/basic store in a working class area, and another with the same name in a much nicer part of town (larger, with more upscale selections, etc.). Winn-Dixie doesn't really have that. They never made any stores to fit into nice neighborhoods and got stuck with middle-of-the-road stores, and even today, Winn-Dixie is the "best" of the three brands they use in their market areas. I don't think SEG is really capable of making a "better" store that's a grade above Winn-Dixie, though.
I think they do try to in some areas. Here in Florida, the Port Charlotte and Apopka stores are quite competitive as well as Sarasota. These are their transformational stores and I'd say the best of them could probably compete with Publix. Some of these stores, although only about 10 years old have already had decor and signage updates to the newest decor, which is a bit surprising.

They've also just opened some new style stores recently that have offerings that try to integrate more with the area They just opened one in Lakewood Ranch in the last month or so, and that's a very up and coming suburb that would probably be all for Publix.. It will be interesting to see how it does.

So I'd say W-D does definitely have some upmarket stores, but the problem is they are too few and far between. They have been trying to clean up their older stores and update them to the same new red decor in the last 5 years, but a quick repaint and signage change doesn't fix customer service or improve the offerings of these blase stores that make up much of their base.
The few Winn-Dixie stores that are upmarket aren't enough to make a difference in the current store base or years of abuse. Sears/Kmart could fix their problems tomorrow and debut a stunning new store with everything from the best softlines either store has seen in decades to a grocery department with a scratch bakery and fresh squeezed juice. Even if they had the cash and leadership to maintain such a store, it will still be a weird anomaly in a broken-down chain.

The previous grocery stores I described took years to get to the point of going both upmarket and downmarket in a single name but for the last thirty years Winn-Dixie has been holding onto old stores longer than they should've, making some awful acquisitions, and overall continually shrinking.
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Re: WD Issues

Post by cjd »

Agreed, you do have to admit though, aside from holding some old stores, they have been putting more effort into updating things than Sears and Kmart ever did in the last 25 years! I have been surprised that despite changing course too many times instead of focusing on one thing, WD has not given up on trying to look like they're doing something in that regard.
Although, I do think their last real push for new stores was in the 90s with Marketplace.

I was surprised to learn, that as dated as many WD stores seemed when I was a kid in the 90s, there was a time when they did update pretty often. Many of those 90s Marketplace stores replaced 70s stores, and many of those 70s stores replaced 40s and 50s Kwik Chek and Winn and Lovett stores. Reading old newspaper articles I was surprised to learn that in my county alone there have been about 3 "generations" of WD stores in each town. I even know of a 1985 build WD that had replaced a 1973 era one in the same shopping center.

So there was a time when WD was replacing stores every 20 years or so, unlike today.

I do wonder if part of WD's styling or architecture tends to make the stores seem more "dated" than Publix stores. For example, in the town near me I can remember the WD store was built in 1985, the Publix across the street was built in 1980. I never knew this as a kid and always assumed the Publix was from the late 80s and the WD was actually from the late 70s. But I was wrong. And it wasn't that the WD was dirty or anything, the styling of it just looked older to me. Even though at that point, I believe both stores still had their original decor packages and refrigeration.

WD ended ended up doing one of their cheap white updates there, about 2003ish, and that was all the updating that ever happened before it closed in 2016. (And it was minimal, just removed the chrome and neon signage, painted the walls white, new decor and aisle signs, and maybe produce refrigeration, Nothing more.). The Publix ended up getting all new refrigeration and at least two, possibly three new decor packages before it was replaced in 2018. It still was a great looking store when it closed, but did feel smaller than the new ones.
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