Stop & Shop closures

[marketreportblog]

Here's my latest blog post about the S&S stores I've visited. The upshot: stock seems to be better? Or maybe just wildly inconsistent. Stores seem to mostly be in decent condition, except for a few, but they all are relatively low-volume -- and they all get lower traffic than their nearby competitors. Plus, so many haven't gotten any renovation in years and they really need it at this point. Rumors are now flying on social media, anything from S&S is just changing corporate management to it's being sold to Kroger. I'll believe any of that when I see it, but I still think something's up.

[storewanderer]

The inconsistency is still very strange. Where is the site visit data from though?

50,000 visits per month is probably great compared to a couple of Save Mart units in my area.

[buckguy]

These are relatively high density areas, so more visits wouldn't be unusual, and individual sales might be on the low side. NJ is still a relatively small part of their footprint. These stores may be attached to something more profitable, otherwise I suspect Ahold would have sold them. They seem to do better in Brooklyn.

[marketreportblog]

The inconsistency is still very strange. Where is the site visit data from though?

50,000 visits per month is probably great compared to a couple of Save Mart units in my area.

Placer.ai, and you can search for a store or an address. Just glancing through some Save Marts, it looks like there's an enormous range -- I see one in Carson City, NV with just 18,900 monthly visits, but Modesto, CA is well over 100,000.

These are relatively high density areas, so more visits wouldn't be unusual, and individual sales might be on the low side. NJ is still a relatively small part of their footprint. These stores may be attached to something more profitable, otherwise I suspect Ahold would have sold them. They seem to do better in Brooklyn.

Agreed, although I would say they don't really want to be in New York City since they keep closing stores. Except maybe some of the far outer reaches of the city, probably Staten Island and eastern Queens and maybe the way northern Bronx. I think the chain overall is profitable, but clearly the New Jersey stores are struggling. Long Island doesn't seem to be, and while public opinion in Connecticut seems to be pretty bad, the stores seem to do just fine. Massachusetts stores seem to do meh volume, especially where they compete with Market Basket. I think the whole chain might just barely be profitable but sliding towards losing money -- my question is just, why now? What some people have said on social media is that Stop & Shop never really recovered from the 2019 strike, but why is that only catching up to that now? I have no idea.

[storewanderer]

The inconsistency is still very strange. Where is the site visit data from though?

50,000 visits per month is probably great compared to a couple of Save Mart units in my area.

Placer.ai, and you can search for a store or an address. Just glancing through some Save Marts, it looks like there's an enormous range -- I see one in Carson City, NV with just 18,900 monthly visits, but Modesto, CA is well over 100,000.

These are relatively high density areas, so more visits wouldn't be unusual, and individual sales might be on the low side. NJ is still a relatively small part of their footprint. These stores may be attached to something more profitable, otherwise I suspect Ahold would have sold them. They seem to do better in Brooklyn.

Agreed, although I would say they don't really want to be in New York City since they keep closing stores. Except maybe some of the far outer reaches of the city, probably Staten Island and eastern Queens and maybe the way northern Bronx. I think the chain overall is profitable, but clearly the New Jersey stores are struggling. Long Island doesn't seem to be, and while public opinion in Connecticut seems to be pretty bad, the stores seem to do just fine. Massachusetts stores seem to do meh volume, especially where they compete with Market Basket. I think the whole chain might just barely be profitable but sliding towards losing money -- my question is just, why now? What some people have said on social media is that Stop & Shop never really recovered from the 2019 strike, but why is that only catching up to that now? I have no idea.

Looking closely at pricing in your photos I think they have a pricing problem. While their pricing looks great to me since I am so used to the terrible Northern California prices I see most often, Market Basket is a very difficult competitor and I don't think they are competitive with them on mix or price and that is a problem.

The chain may have reached a tipping point where too many of the stores are not profitable so they can no longer use the profitable ones to prop up the problem stores. It will be interesting to see what happens. They may need to get out of MA entirely and give the few stores that do okay to Hannaford to take over. NJ should be fixable... is the competition there really that strong?

I'll have to get into that website with the trip stats. That puts the very slow Save Mart around 600 customers per day. They are open 16 hours per day so average about 40 customers per hour. Transaction sizes are not large there either. Sounds about right. 55k square foot store; service meat/pharmacy are closed; bakery had been closed for about 5 years but was recently reopened. Deli is about 1/2 merchandised with one clerk. Usually has about 5 employees working total in the store during the day- 1 cashier, 1 deli, 1 meat, 1 manager (who goes around stocking or being second cashier), and 1 in bakery.

[marketreportblog]

Looking closely at pricing in your photos I think they have a pricing problem. While their pricing looks great to me since I am so used to the terrible Northern California prices I see most often, Market Basket is a very difficult competitor and I don't think they are competitive with them on mix or price and that is a problem.

The chain may have reached a tipping point where too many of the stores are not profitable so they can no longer use the profitable ones to prop up the problem stores. It will be interesting to see what happens. They may need to get out of MA entirely and give the few stores that do okay to Hannaford to take over. NJ should be fixable... is the competition there really that strong?

I'll have to get into that website with the trip stats. That puts the very slow Save Mart around 600 customers per day. They are open 16 hours per day so average about 40 customers per hour. Transaction sizes are not large there either. Sounds about right. 55k square foot store; service meat/pharmacy are closed; bakery had been closed for about 5 years but was recently reopened. Deli is about 1/2 merchandised with one clerk. Usually has about 5 employees working total in the store during the day- 1 cashier, 1 deli, 1 meat, 1 manager (who goes around stocking or being second cashier), and 1 in bakery.

Market Basket is a very tough competitor, and yes, they beat Stop & Shop on both mix and price. But I haven't been to a Massachusetts S&S in around a year, and I'm not sure whether they run different pricing in different states. (Food Trade News' Grocery Industry Directory says there's an office in Purchase, NY that runs the southern stores; the Quincy, MA ones run the northern stores, but I can't confirm that elsewhere.) I doubt they'd get out of MA entirely, though, since that's their home state and there's still a significant amount of western MA where S&S is but MB is not. Still, Hannaford runs excellent stores with much better pricing than S&S, so that would definitely be an upgrade.

NJ is strange because it has lots of supermarkets (and, in some areas, lots of independents) but basically only one mainstream chain that matters in northern NJ -- ShopRite, of course. Stop & Shop and ACME each have their own presence in north Jersey, Weis has a couple scattered stores, and then there are others like Foodtown in a few places, but ShopRite is the only one with a meaningful presence. And ACME is very strong in much of southern NJ, but in central and northern NJ, their stores are scattered, smaller, and lower-volume. ShopRite is completely dominant in north and central Jersey. Even so, their price advantage over their competitors is slimmer than it used to be -- when I do my own price comparison every couple weeks, Stop & Shop, ACME, and ShopRite are rarely more than a couple dollars away from each other (in no particular order, it seems to change every week for the different lists I do). To my surprise, Wegmans has been pretty consistently beating all three on a regular basis.

Northern New Jersey has been a victim of consolidation and bankruptcies. 30 years ago, north Jersey had ACME, Foodtown, Grand Union, ShopRite, A&P, Edwards, and Pathmark, all competing. the market lost most Foodtowns (Twin County Grocers) and, subsequently, the Foodtown stores that didn't close outright largely became A&P or Edwards. Grand Union went under in 2001, and S&S took on most of those stores, around the same time they converted all the Edwards. A&P bought Pathmark in 2007, and by that point, ACME had mostly left north Jersey. 2015 comes and A&P goes under, splitting the stores mostly between ACME and S&S. They each close some random stores around the state over the next 9 years, but don't really open any new ones. Foodtown continues its decline, although lately they've found success in New York City. Meanwhile, ShopRite is aggressively adding new stores and replacing older stores with consistently high-volume locations until there's barely any place left for another mainstream competitor, both literally (in terms of land availability) and figuratively (in terms of market demand). ACME and Stop & Shop both seem to do just fine -- although I question S&S -- but the bottom line is they hang on. But I wouldn't consider either a major competitor at the scale of ShopRite. Stop & Shop spent enormous amounts of money building giant stores in the area maybe 20 years ago, but in my opinion they haven't kept those stores up over the years and so a lot of them are dated and just feel kind of dead these days.

Here's the thing: I'm against the Kroger/Albertsons merger for the big-picture reasons, but I wouldn't be opposed to somebody with deeper pockets and a different strategy taking over ACME. The Kroger stores I've seen elsewhere in the country would easily be viable competitors against ShopRite. I assumed Stop & Shop might fill that role, but their execution is not great and I'm not seeing any real strategy from them, so I don't know what they're up to.

A side note: the specialty supermarket scene in New Jersey is booming. We've got natural supermarkets, Asian supermarkets, Caribbean supermarkets, Italian supermarkets, Middle Eastern supermarkets, gourmet markets, and everything else like that all over the place. But as for the mainstream stores? It seems like it's just impossible to beat or even come close to ShopRite on their home turf.

[veteran+]

Historically, you left Food Fair out of the timline?

[marketreportblog]

Historically, you left Food Fair out of the timline?

I left a lot out, but I was only talking about the last 30 years. Food Fair was gone by 1979.

[BillyGr]

Looking closely at pricing in your photos I think they have a pricing problem. While their pricing looks great to me since I am so used to the terrible Northern California prices I see most often, Market Basket is a very difficult competitor and I don't think they are competitive with them on mix or price and that is a problem.

The chain may have reached a tipping point where too many of the stores are not profitable so they can no longer use the profitable ones to prop up the problem stores. It will be interesting to see what happens. They may need to get out of MA entirely and give the few stores that do okay to Hannaford to take over. NJ should be fixable... is the competition there really that strong?

Market Basket is a very tough competitor, and yes, they beat Stop & Shop on both mix and price. But I haven't been to a Massachusetts S&S in around a year, and I'm not sure whether they run different pricing in different states. (Food Trade News' Grocery Industry Directory says there's an office in Purchase, NY that runs the southern stores; the Quincy, MA ones run the northern stores, but I can't confirm that elsewhere.) I doubt they'd get out of MA entirely, though, since that's their home state and there's still a significant amount of western MA where S&S is but MB is not. Still, Hannaford runs excellent stores with much better pricing than S&S, so that would definitely be an upgrade.

Even so, their price advantage over their competitors is slimmer than it used to be -- when I do my own price comparison every couple weeks, Stop & Shop, ACME, and ShopRite are rarely more than a couple dollars away from each other (in no particular order, it seems to change every week for the different lists I do). To my surprise, Wegmans has been pretty consistently beating all three on a regular basis.

Here's the thing: I'm against the Kroger/Albertsons merger for the big-picture reasons, but I wouldn't be opposed to somebody with deeper pockets and a different strategy taking over ACME. The Kroger stores I've seen elsewhere in the country would easily be viable competitors against ShopRite. I assumed Stop & Shop might fill that role, but their execution is not great and I'm not seeing any real strategy from them, so I don't know what they're up to.

Definitely they wouldn't have to leave the western half of MA - there they are primarily competing with Big Y and in a couple places in the Berkshires Price Chopper/Market 32.
Switching those to the Hannaford branding would be a possibility (though seems it was mentioned there might be union/not union issues), and that could also be thought of for parts of NY where both exist (or close to those areas).

On different pricing, there is at least some of that (from looking at their ads for a similar week), but it seemed to be things that may simply be based on suppliers (for instance having different deals for Coke items).

You shouldn't be at all surprised about Wegman's doing well and beating any of these other chains - they have, over time, gotten this impression of being expensive stores, but that's because people look at the entire store.

The things that tend to be expensive are the specialty items that they have (many of which are not even available in most supermarkets, or at least not in the variety that Wegman's will have of a particular item/category), but when you get to the "center store" type items, they have been equivalent or many times less for years. Some of us when travelling (which has been at least a decade ago now for larger trips, maybe a couple times after that in NJ but very limited) used to fill up extra space in the trunk with not perishable items to being home just because of those better deals they offered.

Kroger could actually take both ACME and Shaw's with no issues (as they are not really anywhere in this part of the country) and both have similar situations, where someone with more "power" could make them far better at competing with other stores in their areas

[veteran+]

Looking closely at pricing in your photos I think they have a pricing problem. While their pricing looks great to me since I am so used to the terrible Northern California prices I see most often, Market Basket is a very difficult competitor and I don't think they are competitive with them on mix or price and that is a problem.

The chain may have reached a tipping point where too many of the stores are not profitable so they can no longer use the profitable ones to prop up the problem stores. It will be interesting to see what happens. They may need to get out of MA entirely and give the few stores that do okay to Hannaford to take over. NJ should be fixable... is the competition there really that strong?

Market Basket is a very tough competitor, and yes, they beat Stop & Shop on both mix and price. But I haven't been to a Massachusetts S&S in around a year, and I'm not sure whether they run different pricing in different states. (Food Trade News' Grocery Industry Directory says there's an office in Purchase, NY that runs the southern stores; the Quincy, MA ones run the northern stores, but I can't confirm that elsewhere.) I doubt they'd get out of MA entirely, though, since that's their home state and there's still a significant amount of western MA where S&S is but MB is not. Still, Hannaford runs excellent stores with much better pricing than S&S, so that would definitely be an upgrade.

Even so, their price advantage over their competitors is slimmer than it used to be -- when I do my own price comparison every couple weeks, Stop & Shop, ACME, and ShopRite are rarely more than a couple dollars away from each other (in no particular order, it seems to change every week for the different lists I do). To my surprise, Wegmans has been pretty consistently beating all three on a regular basis.

Here's the thing: I'm against the Kroger/Albertsons merger for the big-picture reasons, but I wouldn't be opposed to somebody with deeper pockets and a different strategy taking over ACME. The Kroger stores I've seen elsewhere in the country would easily be viable competitors against ShopRite. I assumed Stop & Shop might fill that role, but their execution is not great and I'm not seeing any real strategy from them, so I don't know what they're up to.

Definitely they wouldn't have to leave the western half of MA - there they are primarily competing with Big Y and in a couple places in the Berkshires Price Chopper/Market 32.
Switching those to the Hannaford branding would be a possibility (though seems it was mentioned there might be union/not union issues), and that could also be thought of for parts of NY where both exist (or close to those areas).

On different pricing, there is at least some of that (from looking at their ads for a similar week), but it seemed to be things that may simply be based on suppliers (for instance having different deals for Coke items).

You shouldn't be at all surprised about Wegman's doing well and beating any of these other chains - they have, over time, gotten this impression of being expensive stores, but that's because people look at the entire store.

The things that tend to be expensive are the specialty items that they have (many of which are not even available in most supermarkets, or at least not in the variety that Wegman's will have of a particular item/category), but when you get to the "center store" type items, they have been equivalent or many times less for years. Some of us when travelling (which has been at least a decade ago now for larger trips, maybe a couple times after that in NJ but very limited) used to fill up extra space in the trunk with not perishable items to being home just because of those better deals they offered.

Kroger could actually take both ACME and Shaw's with no issues (as they are not really anywhere in this part of the country) and both have similar situations, where someone with more "power" could make them far better at competing with other stores in their areas

Spot on!!!!