As Walmart continues to grab a greater share of the grocery market, it’s also casting a laserlike focus on a growing number of individual competitors, in carefully-selected cities across the country. But increasingly, devotees of those competitors are saying that all is not as it seems. Walmart introduced its first “Walmart Challenge” ad campaign in Charlotte, North Carolina back in[Read More…]
Imagine a scenario in which grocery prices aren’t marked on the shelves, your cashier has to closely examine every single product you buy, and none of your coupons will scan. Sound like a nightmare? Actually, it’s the way things were just 40 years ago. The Cincinnati Enquirer points out that it was July 1972 when a Kroger supermarket in town[Read More…]
Are you still buying your groceries at a grocery store? How quaint! Supermarkets are poised to lose their position as America’s preferred grocery-shopping destination. And it’s not only big-box discounters like Walmart and Target that are taking their business. The Wall Street Journal reports that supermarkets’ share of U.S. grocery sales fell to 51% last year. And Forbes cites a[Read More…]
Remember Webvan? Having groceries delivered to your door was going to be the next big thing, during the dot-com boom a decade ago. It didn’t quite work out that way. Southeastern supermarket chain Publix made its own effort to get into the home-delivery game in 2001, with PublixDirect. That effort went bust two years later. Publix tried e-commerce again in[Read More…]
If you had a nickel for every time someone walked out of a grocery store with a plastic bag… Actually, if you owned a grocery store in Toronto, Canada, you would! Toronto has scrapped a three-year-old law that charged shoppers a nickel (that’s nearly two nickels in American currency) per plastic bag. Shoppers planning their Canada Day parties and cookouts[Read More…]
