Further to this post – The Fate Of America’s Dying Supercenters – Scot notes how even Wal-Mart is being impacted. From Yahoo Finance:
Wal-Mart’s Supercenters Are Becoming A Major Problem
The retail giant’s mega stores suffered a .3% same-store sales decline in the second quarter compared with last year. During the same period, foot traffic for Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores fell by 1.1%.
By comparison, Wal-Mart’s smaller-format stores, or Neighborhood Markets, generated same-store sales growth of 5.6% and traffic increased by 4.1%. …
On average, consumers shop at five different types of stores to fulfill their grocery needs, according to Deloitte’s 2013 American Pantry report.
Consumers are carrying this shopping behavior over to other product categories, as well.
Instead of relying on a single retailer to give them the best value and assortment, “consumers appear more focused on some combination of value and convenience,” Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a recent research note predicting the slow decline of big-box retailers like Wal-Mart and Target.
I’d love to know how Tsawwassen Mills is anticipating this trend – if it is.
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Among Wal-Mart’s target market (price-conscious shoppers), I think it may be more a realization that superstores don’t always provide the best price.
Wal-Mart isn’t always cheapest – neither is Costco or Real Canadian Superstore. Target isn’t either.
You can get great deals in the city at No Frills or even at the “expensive” supermarkets (Safeway and Save-on-Foods) when items are on sale.
People shop around for the “deals”. That’s also why an “everyday low price” policy would never work (disbn;t work for Eaton’s nor JC Penney) – people don’t focus on averaging their prices – they want the lowest price on each and every item.
I’m going to be watching Tsawwassen Mills with a lot of interest. It’s so far out in the corner of the region and so far from transit services that it seems hard to believe that it will find a market large enough to sustain it.