I thought a Supercenter and Hypermarket were basically the same thing. Back in the 1980s, Auchan (a European store chain) opened a Hypermarket near our house in Houston, and it was the Walmart Supercenter concept, except about a decade ahead of its time.
According to the Wal-Mart site, they have 3 kinds of stores- Supercenters, Discount Stores, and Neighborhood Markets. Based on the description, what you’re calling the “hypermarket’” is their old-style Discount Store.
The Supercenters are full grocery stores. I guess they could also be called hypermarkets since they have more than groceries. I’m talking about the smaller hypermarkets that have very few groceries. There are a lot around here. Walmart may indeed call them discount stores.
actually here in So cal , they say it will lower grocery prices since Krogers is actually cheaper than Albertsons So what will happen here is some Albertsons in urban areas probably will become food4lesses
As part of the Kroger/Albertsons merger they are selling off 400 stores. Also mentioned in the article is that Aldi is buying 400 Winn-Dixie and Harvey stores.
what i loved about Cleveland was that they had 3 local chain supermarkets–Daves, Marcs, Heinens–plus regional Giant Eagle. and of course small Sappells, and at one point TOPS. Now there’s Meijers and Acme moving in
From what I understand it breaks down like this:
Supercenter: Groceries and all the non-grocery stuff. Everything under one roof basically. You can go buy a steak, vegetables, pans to cook it in, grills to grill it on, and tools to assemble the grill all in one store.
Discount Store: Everything but groceries. The old-style Wal-Mart where it was everything but a grocery store, except that it had some limited food items.
Neighborhood Market: The opposite of the Discount Store. A Wal-Mart grocery store that carries what normal grocery stores carry.
I know the Supercenters and Neighborhood Markets are what I describe; I’ve shopped at quite a few. I can’t say I’ve seen a Discount Store in a very long time though.
To me that sounds like Target.
Yup. A traditional Target would be a discount store (and Kmarts would have been, too), while a Super Target is a supercenter (with a fairly extensive grocery section, including fresh produce and meat). But, even the traditional "discount store) Targets typically have grocery sections, though heavy on packaged foods.
Here in the Chicago area, Kroger will be selling 14 of their ~44 Mariano’s stores to C&S, as well as selling the Mariano’s brand name itself to C&S.
What’s not yet clear is:
Canada has both freestanding Wal-Mart stores as well as many that are part of bigger malls. The freestanding stores tend to have more groceries including frozen foods and designated areas like bakeries or butcher shops. The mall stores have dry goods. When malls already have a grocery store, the Wal-Marts tend not to have frozen and specialty foods. If there is enough space and no other grocery store, they have more. But there are probably some exceptions outside my small city.
The Canadian grocery market is dominated by five chains, most of which have one or several associated downmarket chains offering somewhat lower prices and more limited selection. Canada does not have a deep discount grocery chain, and I’m not sure one would survive given the local barriers to entry.
Now there’s a tale for the ages.
Haggen used to be a small chain of about 15 high-end grocery stores, mostly located in western WA and HQed in Bellingham. When Safeway and Albertsons merged in 2015, they agreed to sell 110 west coast locations for anti-monopoly purposes, and somehow Haggen got the high bid and sextupled in size almost overnight.
It didn’t go well. Safeway/Albertson customers didn’t care for the higher prices at the newly rebranded locations, and Haggen shoppers were disappointed with those stores not having the wider selection and extra frills the OG Haggens have. In a little over a year the chain was bankrupt… and got bought out by Albertsons, thus making the whole antitrust measure moot, and the Albertsons in my town that became a Haggen went back to being an Albertsons, with the original 15 stores keeping the name.
Surprisingly, very few store employees lost their jobs as far as I could tell. I guess it pays to be union.
The strange thing is because Albertsons/Vons is so flippin expensive that when Kroger takes over food prices 8n so cal are expected to drop by 15-25percent at the very least … but here in my area well have stores owned by Kroger. 1 Albertsons 2 Vons and 3 food4less
Same in my town. Who left were all of the pharmacy staff, never to be adequately replaced.
And now I see that Albertsons/Kroger are being made to sell another 100-or-so stores to make way for this merger. I pity the small regional chain that takes them up on the offer.
Where are you seeing this?
Kroger can call themselves whatever they want, but the fact is that all the places they own seem to be clones of one another. They carry the same stuff, don’t carry the same stuff, run out of the same stuff, and they do it at the same time, etc.
Here’s the story in my local paper - turns out it’s actually 400 stores they have to spin off, and the buyer is a company that currently operates a couple dozen Piggly Wigglies in NH, so this definitely has the potential to become another Haggen.
@Telemark already mentioned that part of the deal, in their post upthread that revived this topic. And C&S Wholesale Grocers may not currently own a whole lot of stores but they supply groceries to thousands of other stores.
C&S is one of the largest privately owned companies in the US, and their owner is a giant in the industry. Whatever plans they have for these 400 stores, pissing away $1.9B isn’t likely. At $4.6M per location across the country, this is anything but a Mickey Mouse deal.
PW isn’t in NH as far as I know. Did you mean NC?