January 7 update: read “Walmart Responds to Competitors’ Challenge”. It started with supermarkets, then drug stores, then toy and electronics stores, too. Now a number of retailers are crying foul, and asking authorities to investigate the “Walmart Challenge”. The nearly year-old TV, radio, print and online campaign is officially known within Walmart as the “Market Basket Challenge”. The ads are[Read More…]
Isn’t it nice of your local grocery store to offer free WiFi? That way, you can use your mobile device to email, go online – and have your every move tracked while you shop. Nice! It’s well known that one of the tradeoffs of having a store loyalty card is that your store knows what you’re buying. Plenty of shoppers[Read More…]
Sure, you like your local grocery store, but have you “liked” them? A roundup of the most and least popular grocery retailers on social media sites (see the full list below) can yield some interesting insights, though it also shows that “likes” aren’t necessarily everything. Florida-based Publix was recently criticized (in “Frozen & Refrigerated Buyer” magazine) for being “technology-challenged”: “Yes,[Read More…]
Some stores are loyal to their loyalty cards, others hope introducing cards will make their customers loyal to them. But still others refuse to go the loyalty card route – and they may be onto something. If you haven’t read the latest exciting issue of “Frozen & Refrigerated Buyer” magazine – and, really, what’s keeping you? – the trade publication[Read More…]
As more supermarkets expand their selection to include more wine, beer and specialty foods along with the usual staple grocery items, Harris Teeter is taking a different tack. The southeastern grocery chain is planning a brand new store concept that ditches many of the usual staple grocery items altogether, in favor of high-end items that you might need to entertain[Read More…]
As Walmart expands its ad campaign that invites shoppers to “see for yourself” how much lower their prices are, more competitors mentioned by name in those ads are starting to fight back. First it was Milwaukee-based Pick ‘n Save, now it’s Florida-based Publix. But first, some background. Since early this year, the “Walmart Challenge” ads have been rolling out across[Read More…]
Back in the Dark Ages of self-scanning at the supermarket – way back in 2011 – customers thought it was cool if they could use a store-provided “wand” to scan their items as they shopped. Yawn, that’s so last year. Now, at least one major supermarket chain is letting customers scan items with their own phone – and soon, you[Read More…]
It’s not just Walmart that’s taking out full-page newspaper ads to compare its receipts with its competitors’. The same kind of ad war is also happening in a mid-sized Southern city that’s suddenly becoming a whole lot more competitive. Kroger and the new-in-town Publix are battling it out in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a series of newspaper ads that illustrate the[Read More…]
Last month, we brought you news about how some savvy shoppers were finding fault with the “Walmart Challenge” series of advertisements (read: “Always Low Prices. Always. (Sometimes.)” They’re still finding fault, but now a recent survey is offering some insights about the shoppers most likely to be influenced by those ads. The Walmart ad campaign has been running in cities[Read More…]
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…]
