One that’s not on that list: Ruler foods, a no-frills, Aldi-like store featuring Kroger store-brand goods.
As long as we’re listing them, here are the American stores that are part of Ahold Delhaize:
Edwards
Finast
Giant Food Stores
Peapod
Stop & Shop
Tops
Bi-Lo, Bruno’s, FoodSmart, and Red Food Stores used to be part of Ahold but they were sold to another corporation in 2005.
Holy crab, Safeway is Albertsons?!
I grew up with both around since I was a kid, I never knew one bought the other. (Funny thing is I don’t know where there is an Albertsons here anymore but Safeway is still everywhere.)
I live in the greater Seattle area. I use my QFC membership card when I shop at Fred Meyer.
Why no love for Piggly Wiggly?
Unlike the other big chains, Piggly Wigglys are all independently owned-and-operated, which probably has made them not particularly attractive to being bought by Kroger or Albertson’s.
I think Shop-Rite supermarkets in the New York area are the same thing; the stores are franchised.
Not exactly franchised- Shop Rite is a retailer’s cooperative which does mean each store is independently owned-and-operated. They join together to buy in bulk and get better prices and often do joint advertisements, but it’s not like buying a franchise which is generally going to have rules about how you operate your business and what products/services you sell. The thing that’s a little strange about supermarket co-ops is that they don’t have another name- hardware stores that belong to the ACE co-op will have a name like " John’s ACE hardware" but the supermarket ones are just “Shop Rite” or “Key Food”
We used to have an IGA (Independent Grocers Association) around here, which had the owner’s name on it. Locally people tended to refer to it by the owner’s name, rather than IGA.
I came here to post that. NO idea. I always liked Albertsons better than Safeway, but they all disappeared in my area.
Albertson’s bought Safeway in 2014, finalizing the sale in 2015, so it’s a fairly recent acquisition.
I grew up on Albertson’s fried chicken and jojos (potato wedges). So delicious. Apparently there is an Albertson’s in another town (Puyallup), 20 miles and 30 minutes away. So it’s not all gone but it’s definitely not somewhere I’d go for my regular grocery shopping.
Poor Jewel. The Chicago-based grocery store chain has had a torturous ownership story over the past few decades:
- Bought by American Stores in a hostile takeover in 1984
- Taken over by Albertsons in 1999, when Albertsons bought American Stores
- Spun off to SuperValu when Albertsons went through a break-up in 2006
- Sold off by SuperValu to Cerberus Capital Management in 2013, and placed back under the Albertsons LLC umbrella
Around here the Kroger-owned grocery chain is Dillon’s. The problem I have with theory that they don’t want to rebrand stores that people are familiar with, is that all the store-brand products are Kroger brand, not Dillon’s brand. So anyone who shops there regularly should know it’s a Kroger store, despite what it says on the sign out front.
Oddly enough, the Dillon’s store that I shop at regularly was a Kroger store many years ago.
You’d think that people would realize that Kroger owns Dillons (or Albertson owns Safeway or whatever). But many people are incurious. Heck, I’ll bet there are people who still think there’s a guy named Dillon running the company.
A bit of trivia: a lot of people mistakenly spell it Krogers or Kroger’s. FTR, it is Kroger.
That’s definitely something that happens here in the Chicago area with Jewel: it’s very commonly referred to as “Jewel’s.”
Seems like this list is out of date. The earlier mentioned Pick N Save and Mariano’s in Wisconsin & Illinois are not listed.
IGAs tend to be in small towns, I remember Dad taking me to one when I was growing up in rural Illinois. Curiously, a small grocer in this bit of DC’s suburbia joined IGA for a while; people simply continued to refer to it as the original name.
Yeah, that’s pretty common. We also have Meijer around here, which everyone calls Meijers. Strange that no one calls Wal-Mart Wal-Marts.
Also Ralphs is the name of the store, not Ralph’s.
But I can never remember. It’s not our fault they didn’t name themselves correctly.