Who Won The Week Pt. 7

For Memorial Weekend, we have headed west to the high desert of Elko, Nevada. Elko with a population of 20,800 sits on the Humboldt river and the I-80 freeway. Despite its small population, the town supports four banners, Albertsons, Raley's, Smith's and a Walmart Supercenter.

For our analysis we will exclude EDLP and smaller single-location banners, making a three horse race - appropriate for Elko's cowboy heritage. Memorial Day is a big grocery shop and retailers typically hold back some promotion budget from prior weeks in the hope that they can win larger baskets in the lead up to this weekend.

Banner	Start Of Ad Week	Page Count	HQ Zip Code
Albertsons	Wednesday	6	83706
Raley's	Wednesday	4	95605
Smith's Food and Drug	Wednesday	10	84104
Walmart Supercenter	N/A	-	72716

Front Pages

Albertsons and Raley's front pages reminding shoppers it Memorial Weekend, and by implication reminding them to open up their wallets.

Who Won

Smith's front page won on both our metrics, 1. retailer with most promos of highest appeal (breadth) and 2. retailer with highest percentage of customer interest (potential share driver). What is interesting was that our AI shoppers chose the pork back ribs at 2.99/lb as well as cherries at 3.99/lb, both items placed below the fold. Raley's got the second most selected item with their featured tomatoes on the vine promo at 1.97/lb.

Key Take Aways

On holiday weekends, retailers are in a bind. On the one hand they want to have a strong set of lead promotions, yet they know their competitors will be doing exactly the same. This benefits the shopper but it is unlikely to help retailers win market share.

The maxim 'feature what they want, merchandise what you want to sell' held true for Smith's this week. They probably expected Albertsons and Raley's to run similar above-the-fold fresh items and similar national-brand centre store promos but what gave them the edge was the well-priced pork ribs, their diamond in the rough for this weekend.