Retail Watchers

Come on Albertsons...

retailfanmitchell019 wrote: ↑January 28th, 2021, 5:10 pm Come on Albertsons...

This is a former Shop N Save and is no surprise.

Albertsons would bring the quality of Schnucks operation way down and given Schnucks already sold off pharmacy, a line of business Albertsons is fairly heavy in, I do not see a purchase there. I expect Schnucks to remain a privately held regional chain; they are a high quality operator but they seem to take some of the "wrong" stores- taking Hilander from Kroger in Rockford, IL was clearly not a great decision and taking those Shop N Saves in St. Louis was also not the right fit.

We need to see regionals that run a quality operation like Schnucks stick around under private family ownership (like Raleys)... not get homogenized by the publicly traded national chains.

storewanderer wrote: ↑January 28th, 2021, 7:42 pm

retailfanmitchell019 wrote: ↑January 28th, 2021, 5:10 pm Come on Albertsons...

This is a former Shop N Save and is no surprise.

Albertsons would bring the quality of Schnucks operation way down and given Schnucks already sold off pharmacy, a line of business Albertsons is fairly heavy in, I do not see a purchase there. I expect Schnucks to remain a privately held regional chain; they are a high quality operator but they seem to take some of the "wrong" stores- taking Hilander from Kroger in Rockford, IL was clearly not a great decision and taking those Shop N Saves in St. Louis was also not the right fit.

We need to see regionals that run a quality operation like Schnucks stick around under private family ownership (like Raleys)... not get homogenized by the publicly traded national chains.

I think I mentioned back when Schnucks divested their pharmacy operations it was clearly a poison pill to ward off Kroger and Albertsons. However, if Schnucks was as strong under the hood as store count would suggest, it wouldn't have needed to.

And buying stores they have no business buying is part of that. We've seen it with Albertsons and their acquisition spree in the late 1990s, creating an uneven mix of stores of every shape and size across the country (the Des Moines Super One Foods, the TN Bruno's stores, Seessel's, Smitty's-MO, Lucky...) that they had to sell off or close within a few years anyway. Buying Shop 'n Save from SuperValu/UNFI seemed to be a defensive move against a competitor that didn't exist, as the closest competitor of Schnucks I can tell is Dierbergs at a distant number two.

Schnucks has a long history of buying out its competitors--they did this with Bettendorf-Rapp a million years ago and more recently with National (itself a conglomeration of its own and departing chains' stores), before Shop-n-Save. These all were mixed bags, in terms of store inventory. Bettendorf had large upscale stores when those were a true novelty. National had a very strong operation there, at one time, including a large number of food-pharmacy combos, but they also had some old A&Ps and 1950s stores of their own that existed mostly to keep competition away from certain areas. I wouldn't read too much into closing an oils Shop-n-Save----they've done this with a bunch of others in the last year or so. They really did screw-up with Sesssels, but Memphis is a weird market, where many chains have come and gone over the years and only Kroger in all its mediocrity, has survived.

The store they are closing is about one block away from an existing Schnucks (former Kroger, then National) and two additional Schnucks are less than two miles away. This SNS location was large, but kind of a dump. Not surprised it is getting closed.
Schnucks bought Shop ‘N Save as a defensive move. They bought the locations they did to keep competition from entering. They did the same thing with National in the late 90’s, and slowly pared away the weaker locations.

The issue is the Shop N Save Stores simply aren't as nice as a Schnucks. There was nothing really wrong with Shop N Save- they were just a rather drab and not very nice looking store. Clean, bright, sure, but that was where it stopped. Shop N Save like much of the Supervalu Corporate Retail was halfway between a conventional store and halfway like a warehouse store so it was not an upscale operation (but not run down, either). Too much white and not enough color.

Schnucks actually has pretty nice looking, nicely presented stores. They put some effort into making their stores look nice. They probably took the Shop N Save with the consideration of keeping it and remodeling but then opted to keep their original store instead.

I had pretty low expectations of Schnucks based on some things I had heard about them before actually going into one, and I was really surprised when I went into a few of their stores for the first time how well executed their fresh departments were, how well merchandised center store was, that they had adequate staffing levels, etc. Pricing isn't great but they seem to know what they can get away with when it comes to price, they aren't too far out of line.

Yeah, between Schnucks and Dierberg's, St. Louis has a very high expectation of it's run-of-the-mill grocery stores. With Save-A-Lot actually based in St. Louis, and Aldi having a 40 year history (one of their first stores in 1980 actually went into an old Schnucks on Manchester), the low-end is taken care of, and with a small even higher-end carriage-trade chain (Straub's) at the high end, Shop and Save was just a blah operator compared with relatively plush Schnucks/Dierbergs. This specific location was actually in an old Zayre (!) and had easy accessibility to a small post-war suburban area, but didn't have much else going for it. The two 35 year old Schnucks 1/2 mile away on Lindbergh and 2 miles away up Tesson Ferry more than took care of the needs of the community, and a high-end Schnucks (actually the last National built in the market--a really excellent store) is about 3 miles away in Crestwood. Zooming out, neither this nor the sell-off of the pharmacy business has much to say about the health of Schnucks...opportunistic in both cases. I'll add more on the pharmacy in that tab.