I'd be tempted to dismiss "small-ish markets" as when expanding, companies tend to keep smaller, legacy sites and ignore small markets when they're going out into new territory. Even H-E-B keeps to this standard, there are plenty of old, small stores even as far north as Marlin (which has an H-E-B that has barely seen any updates in decades, the facade doesn't even have the modern logo), yet they're only going in larger markets with 100k+ square foot stores.storewanderer wrote: ↑April 3rd, 2022, 1:04 pmWinCo doesn't exactly cluster quickly in most cases, but over time they have clustered some metro areas. They are in a lot of small-ish markets specifically in Northern California, Idaho, and Oregon.pseudo3d wrote: ↑April 2nd, 2022, 8:19 am
Looking at WinCo's geographic spread, they tend to cluster in metropolitan areas, and the next viable "metropolitan area" to the south would be the Waco area, but H-E-B has had a total lock in it for decades, and even Albertsons never got more than one (three if you count Temple-Killeen) into the city at the height of its store count. They probably could do it, but their business model seems to be to put more than one in an area, but compounding this is that H-E-B is more easy to adapt its stores to the lower-end that WinCo goes for.
Could it be done? Probably. But right now, Oklahoma seems to be far easy pickings as far as WinCo expansion goes.
WinCo can easily open one store in a market. The way WinCo works- little to no advertising (no routine advertising at all), they deliver full truckloads of product to the stores when they do deliveries, their volume is so high when they negotiate with vendors that a vendor negotiating with a single WinCo is like negotiating with 2-3 conventional stores... they can easily support a single store in an area.
Keep in mind on the volume comment when you have WinCo doing $1 million a week in sales that is virtually all grocery. There is no pharmacy and limited drug in these stores. Perimeter bakery/deli doesn't strike me as overly high volume either. WinCo moves packaged grocery items/dairy/beverages in extreme sales volumes.
And while H-E-B is the top dog in Waco, I don't think it's impermeable. Albertsons left in 2006 but the one store that closed wasn't exactly in a prime location and Winn-Dixie left in 2002 because of reasons largely unrelated to H-E-B's power in the area.
Meanwhile, Aldi is making good business, Brookshire has one of its farthest-reaching stores in one of the suburbs, and an IGA that has managed to outlast several key competitors in the area while keeping its late 1970s orange-and-red striped interior. All these stores call McLennan County home. I think WinCo can declare war on H-E-B and survive. The only other big chains south of Dallas are Kroger (which has sort-of given up on Houston, even if it has a massive market share) and Randalls (which even disregarding the parent company's struggles and severely neglected market has a poor reputation).