Who Won The Week Pt. 5
In case you have been living under a rock, it's Mother's Day on Sunday. Another themed week for grocery retailers to hang their creative hats on.
We wanted to choose an appropriately themed location for this week's analysis. After a few hours in a Google Maps / Wikipedia rabbit hole we settled on The City of BrMotherly Love, aka Philadelphia 1.
We have now added some more banners to our map, we have over 13500 grocery supermarket locations mapped and will be adding all the Kroger banners in the next week. This should bring us to nearly 16,000 locations.
As our reference store we selected the Acme Markets location at 7700 Crittenden Street, PA. 19118, and then selected three other stores within a mile or two of that location. We have excluded Aldi from this week's analysis. Interestingly, both Shop Rite and The Fresh Grocer are part of Wakefern Food Corp., a retailer-owned cooperative.
| Banner | Start Of Ad Week |
|---|---|
| Acme Markets | Friday |
| Fresh Grocer | Friday |
| Fresh Market | Thursday |
| Shop Rite | Sunday |
Unusually there is quite a disparity between the different starting days of the ad week. While these promotions and ads have been planned weeks in advance, there is probably a lot more pressure on Shop Rite since their merch team will know that a better Weekly Ad could drop just before the key shopping days of the week.
The Front Pages
Both The Fresh Grocer and Shop Rite are running many of the same items on promotion this week, a quick scan shows at least five items featured on the front page of both ads:
- Eggo Waffles
- Hellman's Mayonnaise
- Turkey Hill Ice Cream
- Snapple Iced tea
- Scott Bath Tissue
- Fresh Corn
- Blueberries
In each case, Shop Rite is the same price or a few pennies cheaper.
Who Won
Unsurprisingly, Shop Rite had a stronger front page, in terms of price vs The Fresh Grocer and in terms of range and price compared to Acme Markets. Having said that The Fresh Grocer took the top three spots among our AI Shoppers; steaks, tomatoes and potatoes being selected before any item from Shop Rite's front page.
Key Take Aways
With a stronger front page from Acme, they could easily win the week among price-discerning shoppers. Both Shop Rite and The Fresh Grocer are not using any science to package together an effective and efficient front page. There strategy is to put as many items as possible on the front page and then rely on the shopper to do the work of piecing together the best deals. With some thought and application of DecaSIM's technology, Acme Markets could win baskets from both banners without having to give away margin.
Get in touch to find out how your geography and banner perform.
Footnotes
-
If Philadelphia is known as the "City of Brotherly Love" (derived from Greek "philos" meaning love and "adelphos" meaning brother), then a city of motherly love might be called "Metropolis." This name would draw from the Greek roots "meter" (mother) and "polis" (city), creating a name that literally means "mother city." In fact, the word "metropolis" originally referred to a parent city from which colonies were founded in ancient Greece, so it has historical connections to the concept of motherhood. ↩