La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by storewanderer »

ClownLoach wrote: December 18th, 2022, 8:55 pm
veteran+ wrote: December 18th, 2022, 7:15 am
ClownLoach wrote: December 17th, 2022, 11:04 pm

I forgot to mention that the Foothill Ranch test has no Fresh Fare sign. It does have window graphics saying "welcome to Foothill Ranch Fresh Fare" over the door, and inside it has Fresh Fare wall graphics. But zero external signage. Again no sign of any commitment to this sub banner.
I witnessed that exact same thing in Mission Valley. There was NO external indication the store was a Fresh Fare (that may have changed) AND did not show up as a Fresh Fare online.
Foothill got a new regular Ralphs sign and a full exterior repaint as part of the remodel. No Fresh Fare signage other than the window graphics.
Almost seems like they don't even know what format the stores are... given how Kroger is, that would not be too surprising. But it certainly shows this is not a distinct format at this point and "just another store."
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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by veteran+ »

Bluelightspecial wrote: December 18th, 2022, 8:30 pm Maybe this is more appropriate to the Spinco thread, but reading through all these posts on La Jolla proves my point about Pavilions. I would argue this also proves that Spinco would not just be Albertsons/Safeway stores they would sell some Ralph's stores to keep some of these locations that are high profile.

1. Safeway did dumb down Pavilions years ago, and Albertsons has tried to differentiate and make it more upscale.
2. Vons built some Pavilions in areas that they never should have before they were bought by Safeway (Upland!). Albertsons has already "culled" the stores by renaming many to Vons. Monrovia, Anaheim Hills, Arcadia.
3. Kroger is doing the same things to Fresh Fare that Safeway did before. There are some nasty Fresh Fares out there that are nothing special.
3. The Pavilions stores are some of the highest volume stores in Albertsons Southern California. I believe the West Hollywood store is one of the highest volumes in their entire fleet, or used to be. Why would they get rid of that for a 25k sq/ft dirty Fresh Fare down the street. The one's in Orange County, as someone else mentioned, are premium locations and high volume stores.
Spot on!

Actually that gross Fresh Fare is only about 16000 sqft!
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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by veteran+ »

ClownLoach wrote: December 18th, 2022, 9:02 pm
veteran+ wrote: December 18th, 2022, 7:25 am
storewanderer wrote: December 18th, 2022, 12:32 am

Maybe they just haven't put signs up yet?

A lot of decisions will have to be made on what to do going forward. Who knows- maybe they will keep the Pavilions banner and run it as a true upscale format. But Kroger's history on odd formats that need to do one off things in individual locations isn't great. Look at that short lived Main & Vine up in WA.

It would be nice for the Fresh Fare Stores if they would just clean the stores up. Make them bright and shiny, with nice presentation again. Cut the clutter, cut the cheap looking standard Kroger marketing signs like digital coupons hanging from the ceiling, get rid of the bad bakery products (find an edible french bread, come on Kroger... find an edible french bread), etc.
They know how to do all you mentioned. With their knowledge of Vandekamps there is no excuse. There is a very very large Fresh Fare in the La Jolla area on the way to Blacks Beach that is STELLAR!

There are stand out operations but that comes from uniquely outstanding Store Directors, not from anyone above them. I find this trickle down effect to most of their stores very disturbing, especially at Ralphs. Ralphs like King Soopers before Kroger were diamond operators with extraordinary reputations.

In fact when I was with King Soopers we traded and visited Ralphs to share best practices. It was a wonderful and fruitful program.
I agree there are some stellar Fresh Fare stores. But they still lack a significant number of the features and merchandise that are in the current flagship level Pavilions stores - items and categories that add hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in sales like the extra premium liquor and Santa Monica Seafood. I am not aware of any Kroger stores that have wine or liquor at the top tier where they get highly allocated bourbons that could sell for thousands of dollars a bottle - but many Pavilions and even some Albertsons branded stores get these. They actually sell the stuff otherwise they would not be allocated for it. There is an entire next level tier of product that I just have not seen in any Fresh Fare store that Pavilions both carries and actually sells. I only bring it up because if these stores were "downgraded" from a Pavilions to a Fresh Fare with the current model then it would result in a real and measurable reduction in total sales and average order value. There is no way Kroger would want to see double digit AOV drops in any store.
Yes, I agree, except I think Fresh Fare has many more organic skus than Pavilions (which is weird since Safeway was ahead of the organic trend a few years before Kroger).
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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by storewanderer »

veteran+ wrote: December 19th, 2022, 5:37 am

Yes, I agree, except I think Fresh Fare has many more organic skus than Pavilions (which is weird since Safeway was ahead of the organic trend a few years before Kroger).
Safeway Organic Program is terrible. Prices are higher than Whole Foods. This has been a problem for the past 10+ years. O Organics is a weird mix of SKUs that is not cohesive or clear throughout the store.

Safeway had all the right ideas on Organic with the Lifestyle Stores- O Organics product line, expanded well displayed and well positioned Organic produce. They blew it with pricing and poor execution due to starving the stores of labor. Trying to price higher than Whole Foods on Organics was a braindead move. Also they tried to push heavy amounts of this very overpriced Organic stuff in very rural stores where customers did not care about these items and experienced significant shrink. Then as items didn't sell they got discontinued and in some cases there were so many stores with slow sales (rural stores or even suburb stores near a Fred Meyer or Sprouts or Whole Foods etc.) than even stores in some locations that should have had strong Organic product sales, had weak organic product sales, and it all came down to the terrible pricing and not great execution. And that is how the screwed up lack of Organic SKUs you see at Safeway today came to be.

Kroger has run circles around Safeway on Organic. Simple Truth product line with many Organic SKUs in every department, is very reasonably priced and has been a complete and total home run, this is the best private label launch I've seen. I am hoping Kroger can keep up the momentum Simple Truth has. The line is well assorted and priced very reasonably. It also seems to be steady on SKUs (I keep seeing SKUs added, and don't see many SKUs discontinued). And getting the customer who is buying these Simple Truth items is a segway into selling more other products that are Organic, like produce. And when you look at Organic produce at Kroger, it is not significantly more expensive than non-Organic produce. Unlike Safeway who back in the 2010 period had the worst prices in the market for non-Organic produce then took the Organic produce and tried to charge double those prices for it which was basically the worst pricing anywhere for Organic produce.
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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by BreakingThrough »

ClownLoach wrote: December 17th, 2022, 2:47 am And we haven't seen the last of San Diego Vons conversions either; La Costa should be next. It was going to be done in 2019 but it was delayed by construction of a movie theater in the complex which reduced parking and then the pandemic hit. I personally saw the parking lot plan for staging of construction containers when it was presented to neighboring stores (who all were unhappy with the plan)
When you say Vons La Costa, do you mean Via Montebello in La Costa Town Square, or El Camino Real / Aviara Parkway in Plaza Paseo Real? I think both could support transitioning to Pavilions, but I'm guessing you mean the Via Montebello store.

I grew up in the area...will be down that way next week for Xmas actually...and basically grew up in the Aviara Vons and remember when it opened in the early '90s that it absolutely seemed like the grocery store of the future. The Via Montebello store is very nice, seems larger than Aviara and is surrounded by high-income neighborhoods. Seems like a no-brainer as Pavilions.

I now live in LA and I've found many people don't even realize that "Fresh Fare" is a "thing." One friend thought it was Ralphs' slogan. My office is near the El Segundo Ralphs, which was made a Fresh Fare several years back. It got a nice remodel and added the Murray's counter and a Starbucks, but didn't seem like there was much more added.
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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by ClownLoach »

BreakingThrough wrote: December 21st, 2022, 2:58 pm
ClownLoach wrote: December 17th, 2022, 2:47 am And we haven't seen the last of San Diego Vons conversions either; La Costa should be next. It was going to be done in 2019 but it was delayed by construction of a movie theater in the complex which reduced parking and then the pandemic hit. I personally saw the parking lot plan for staging of construction containers when it was presented to neighboring stores (who all were unhappy with the plan)
When you say Vons La Costa, do you mean Via Montebello in La Costa Town Square, or El Camino Real / Aviara Parkway in Plaza Paseo Real? I think both could support transitioning to Pavilions, but I'm guessing you mean the Via Montebello store.

I grew up in the area...will be down that way next week for Xmas actually...and basically grew up in the Aviara Vons and remember when it opened in the early '90s that it absolutely seemed like the grocery store of the future. The Via Montebello store is very nice, seems larger than Aviara and is surrounded by high-income neighborhoods. Seems like a no-brainer as Pavilions.

I now live in LA and I've found many people don't even realize that "Fresh Fare" is a "thing." One friend thought it was Ralphs' slogan. My office is near the El Segundo Ralphs, which was made a Fresh Fare several years back. It got a nice remodel and added the Murray's counter and a Starbucks, but didn't seem like there was much more added.
The Via Montebello one. The issue at the time was that part of the parking was going to be blocked off for movie theater construction at the same time as the remodel. Despite the appearance of lots of parking this is actually a bit of a space challenged lot. I expressed my concern with having too much parking blocked off all at once and I know other stores did too. A lot has happened since then; the pandemic, Stein Mart closed etc. So I don't know what their current plans are to go back and do the conversion. I would imagine it would have been a priority.
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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by storewanderer »

BreakingThrough wrote: December 21st, 2022, 2:58 pm

I now live in LA and I've found many people don't even realize that "Fresh Fare" is a "thing." One friend thought it was Ralphs' slogan. My office is near the El Segundo Ralphs, which was made a Fresh Fare several years back. It got a nice remodel and added the Murray's counter and a Starbucks, but didn't seem like there was much more added.
Pretty bad... I am starting to think this "fresh fare" branding is largely meaningless and they should just scrap it entirely. It never got much traction outside Ralphs as the other Kroger divisions didn't take it seriously after doing the remodels, and now at Ralphs it sounds like there is a lot of confusion about it.

Maybe they would have a use for Pavilions if they want a different banner/upscale format to use. They certainly won't be wanting to keep the Vons or Albertsons banners to use on an upscale format... so it is either going to be Ralphs Fresh Fare or Pavilions...
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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by pseudo3d »

storewanderer wrote: December 22nd, 2022, 12:04 am
BreakingThrough wrote: December 21st, 2022, 2:58 pm

I now live in LA and I've found many people don't even realize that "Fresh Fare" is a "thing." One friend thought it was Ralphs' slogan. My office is near the El Segundo Ralphs, which was made a Fresh Fare several years back. It got a nice remodel and added the Murray's counter and a Starbucks, but didn't seem like there was much more added.
Pretty bad... I am starting to think this "fresh fare" branding is largely meaningless and they should just scrap it entirely. It never got much traction outside Ralphs as the other Kroger divisions didn't take it seriously after doing the remodels, and now at Ralphs it sounds like there is a lot of confusion about it.

Maybe they would have a use for Pavilions if they want a different banner/upscale format to use. They certainly won't be wanting to keep the Vons or Albertsons banners to use on an upscale format... so it is either going to be Ralphs Fresh Fare or Pavilions...
Fresh Fare I did see on at least one Texas store, but I get the suspicion that it got run into the ground like Signature did. Kroger Signature in Texas was an idea basically to compete with Randalls/Tom Thumb and Albertsons with new 65k+ square foot stores and bringing Kroger into the future, away from the 30k-45k square feet (or less) Greenhouse stores that dominated those markets. The early stores had food courts, full perishable departments, coffee bars, and even some features like a daycare (these disappeared in the early 2000s). But by the mid-2000s, they were applying the Signature name to dozens of stores, even existing Greenhouse stores, that had none of those features. More confusingly, the stores they picked up from Albertsons weren't branded as Signature, despite being the modern, airy stores Kroger really needed at the time.
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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by storewanderer »

pseudo3d wrote: December 22nd, 2022, 9:07 am

Fresh Fare I did see on at least one Texas store, but I get the suspicion that it got run into the ground like Signature did. Kroger Signature in Texas was an idea basically to compete with Randalls/Tom Thumb and Albertsons with new 65k+ square foot stores and bringing Kroger into the future, away from the 30k-45k square feet (or less) Greenhouse stores that dominated those markets. The early stores had food courts, full perishable departments, coffee bars, and even some features like a daycare (these disappeared in the early 2000s). But by the mid-2000s, they were applying the Signature name to dozens of stores, even existing Greenhouse stores, that had none of those features. More confusingly, the stores they picked up from Albertsons weren't branded as Signature, despite being the modern, airy stores Kroger really needed at the time.
They have/had a Ralphs "Signature" in downtown San Diego which had a fresh fare interior. Also a Fry's "Signature" that had a fresh fare interior...

I was of the impression "Signature" was a bigger size "fresh fare" store.
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Re: La Jolla Vons to be converted to Pavilions

Post by retailfanmitchell019 »

Here's how I think the Albertsons/Kroger merger will go in San Diego's North County:

Every Albertsons branded store will be divested into SpinCo. There are 13 Albertsons stores in North County: Oceanside (3), Vista (2), San Marcos (3), Escondido (2), Fallbrook, Ramona, and Rancho Bernardo.
I also think Vons stores in Oceanside, Encinitas (El Camino), Carmel Valley (both stores including the Pavilions), Rancho Bernardo, Escondido (Valley Pkwy) and Carlsbad (El Camino) will go into SpinCo and be rebranded to Albertsons. Those stores directly compete with a Ralphs in the same zip code. I expect the remaining Vons stores to be rebranded to Ralphs.
The Food 4 Less in Escondido could also go into SpinCo, or maybe to a Hispanic chain.
I expect the Food 4 Less in Vista (former Smith's) will stay with Kroger and be rebranded to Ralphs.
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