American grocery store chains (2024)

Really wish we had an Aldi within driving distance. I've visited a few on vacation in another state and would really love it if it was near me.

Don't get me started on Wegman's.

Our grocery chains are acceptable, at best.

Ralphs today - I like it better than Vons, which can be hit or miss.

Otherwise, I'm an ALDI guy for essentials.

Vons>Pavilions>Safeway.

Pretty well not great these days in my area, and have a problem with items ringing up more than the shelf price.

I would go to Lucky before Safeway. Cheaper and not trying to f*ck people around.

I tend to spend my dollars on local markets nearest to me, so neither Safeway nor Lucky are my go-to for groceries.

I still can't believe there's an American grocery store chain called Piggly-Wiggly.

When Fannie Flagg mentioned it in Fried Green Tomatoes I thought it was a joke.

Today was my grocery shopping day.

First went to Ralphs for my majority of my shopping. Ralphs is my go-to grocery store.

After that, I stopped at Pavilions (an upscale version of Vons) for a couple of things only carried there. Luckily both were in stock. YEAH.

Later I stopped at Sprouts just because I was driving by it. Figured I'd see what they had on sale.

Finally stopped at Whole Foods to see if any of the handful of items I buy there were on sale. Two were, so I bought them. My Amazon prime membership got me a further 10% discount on those sale items.

I live in the rural South, so, unless I decide to drive 20 miles to get groceries, my options are limited to the following,

Food Lion

Family Foods, good meat department, but, a friend's teenage daughter worked there, the management treated her like dirt.

Dollar General, four of them in the tiny county where I live.

Mom & Pop type stores, fun to shop in, they also tend to good meat departments.

Publix's slogan is "where shopping is a pleasure". But as an introvert I don't find it a pleasure to shop there. Their overly chatty cashiers make Trader Joe's cashiers seem introverted.

Not all their stores have self-checkout but even the ones that do, the attendants at self-checkout will come over and comment on your purchase, "oh I haven't seen that flavor of ice cream, is it new? Is it good". If I wanted to chat I would have gone to one of the many open regular checkouts!

You don't have to make eye contact with Publix employees or even be facing them for them to go out of their way to greet you. They will come up behind you or even crouch down to say "hello". I don't find this friendly; I find it very odd. They've even startled me a couple of times when they've surprise greeted me from behind (cue surprise anal jokes...). They really take it to the extreme there.

In conclusion: If we haven't made eye contact and I'm not facing you and I don't even know you are behind me, there is no reason to greet me. Also, if I'm using self-checkout, I don't want to chat about my purchases or anything.

NJ here.

Shop Rite, Kings and Stop & Shop are our big 3.

I’ve got all 3 within 5 miles but I tend to choose Shop Rite 99% of the time.

r29 Shop Rite? I'd call it Shop Rong.

But I call The Real Canadian Superstore The StupidStore.

Food Lion now has an outlet store?

What do they carry? Expired meats and rotting fruit? Dented canned goods. Cereal boxes that have been cut open? Moldy bread?

NYer here - grew up with A&P supermarkets, then Pathmark came into town and started shopping there. In the last 15 years I'd been a Stop & Shop person until the one located 2 blocks from my house closed. I now do 90% of my grocery shopping from Amazon Fresh.

Occasionally I would take a side trip to the Fairway Market near the river when the mood struck. That store was considered fancy because they had a big cheese counter, lots of aged beef and exotic (for me) seafood, like sea bass. The Fairway is gone now - bankruptcy a few years ago.

I grew up near Philly — shopping at Pathmark and Acme. Is Genuardi’s still around? I thought Genuardi’s were a real step up in the 1990s.

Oh, and there was SuperFresh, the freshest way to save.

When I am visiting my family back home, I shop aGiant Eagle, a former Fisher-Fazio location. And Buehler's.

Here I do my weekly at Ralphs (part of the Kroger Empire). I avoid chain stores for meat; I go to a small carnicería/meat market.

[quote]California has the most grocery store chains I ever seen in my life.

A lot of them are connected:

Vons-Pavilions-Albertson-Safeway

Ralphs-Food4Less

SaveMart-Lucky

Stater Bros

Gelson's

Amazon Fresh-Whole Foods

Bristol Farms-Lazy Acres

Sprouts

And of course Walmart, Target, Trader Joe's, Costco, Sam's Club, Aldi

And LOTS of Hispanic and Asian chains (and independent markets)

r69 In the late 1980s, Safeway sold all its stores in the Southwest to Vons, which later rebranded them as Vons. The rest of the Safeway stores in the US were unaffected by this sale.

Then in the late 1990s, Safeway obtained a controlling interest in Vons, and the Vons chain became a subsidiary of Safeway. however, they retained the Vons names.

In 2014, Cerberus Capital Management, which owns the Albertsons grocery chian, purchased Safeway. So, now all the Vons, Albertsons and Safeway stores are owned by the same company. But they've all kept their individual store names.

But now Kroger is trying to merge with Albertsons, but the FTC is trying to stop the merger, saying it would result in higher prices and less competition.

Most people don’t realize it but Piggly Wiggly was the first modern grocery store. Before they opened in the run up to WWI, there were no such things as shopping carts or grocery aisles. A shopper would go into a grocery, hand the clerk a list, which the clerk would fill from shelves behind the counter.

Along with the department store, and mail-order, Piggly Wiggly transformed how America and the world shopped forever.

Piggly Wiggly’s are vanishingly rare in most of the South these days but in 1921 there were seven in Raleigh, population 25,000, alone.

pw actually has been upgrading stores and is not cheap despite the name.

fl will harris teeter-fy a store in a wealthy area.

I've never been to HEB, but Texans seem to love it. Apparently, it's an experience.

You whor*s are going to make fun of me, but when I'm traveling, I love to visit grocery stores in other cities just to see what they're like.

R79, Piggly Wiggly stores were already disappearing before Walmart became ubiquitous around here. The globalization of the food chain, the consolidation of small local chains as well as major food brands, and the constant narrowing of the margins in the grocery business started killing them off in the early 80s.

Piggly Wiggly was not a corporate chain of grocery stores but rather a consortium of independent operators much like IGA and McDonald’s franchisees. They carried the same house-branded products, shared distribution networks, and advertised collectively but each independently set their own prices and on the store level of the business, they couldn’t take advantage of efficiencies of scale like the corporate-owned stores.

As the grocery business became less about knowing and serving the your immediate area well and more about loyalty cards and the lowest absolute price, the family businesses couldn’t compete.

By 2000 there were only two or three left in my area of North Carolina. The last one in Raleigh, at 5 Points, the business and service hub for the Hayes Barton and Country Club Hills neighborhoods, the richest part of town since WWII

It was able to survive because they could charge premium prices based ostensibly on location and service, but really on nostalgia. So far as I know, they still offered grocery delivery long before that become common again and many people over 40 continued to shop there simply because the Piggly Wiggly was where their type of people shopped.

When the store finally closed, around 2001 or so, the fear that it would be torn down to build something ugly combined with the nostalgia for “Old Raleigh” was so great that a well-born, local restaurateur in the vein of Ina Garten bought it and opened a restaurant, deli, and gift shop in the newly renovated space called NOFO at the Pig. It was hugely successful at the time and I believe continues to pack them in, at least on weekends.

[quote] After that, I stopped at Pavilions (an upscale version of Vons) for a couple of things only carried there.

I've never understood the distinction corporate was trying to make between Vons and Pavilions (both Safeway). That's probably why they ended up converting so many Pavilions back to being Vons, and they didn't need to change anything other than the sign outside and the name on the shopping carts. The only noticeable difference was that Pavilions had a bigger liquor and wine department -- for awhile. Even that remained the same size in the former Pavilions that converted back to a Vons near me. Then, there's the Albertsons near me (also Safeway), and their liquor and wine department is even bigger, so big that they have a bar and stools set up in the middle of it where they have someone come in and talk about wine and spirits, etc. sometimes. And the weekly ad for Vons and Albertsons is the exact same.

Our Pavilions rebranded as Vons a couple years ago; only the signage changed. Including this Vons, there are six Vons in Long Beach, three Albertsons, and five Ralphs. If Kroger succeeds in acquiring Albertsons, it will control well over half the full service supermarkets here. There are three Sprouts and two Stater Bros, so 13-5 in favor of Kroger.

Sure, we have Trader Joe’s, Amazon Fresh/Whole Foods, and Grocery Outlet Bargain Markets, but none of them is a full service market. I used to treasure my weekly marketing, but I now just hate having to get groceries.

The Pavillions in West Hollywood is one of the busiest and most profitable stores that Albertsons has. It is also on the list of stores they will divest if the Kroger-Albertsons merger goes through.

C&S is not an upscale chain. Replacing the upscale Pavillions with C&S is not an equal trade. The customers will definitely suffer.

Also remember when Albertsons acquired Vons/Safeway a decade ago, Albertsons sold off many of its stores, espeically in locations where there was a Vons nearby. They sold the stores to the Haggen grocery chain, which was based in the Seattle area. The converted Haggen stores were poorly received and about six months after converting them, Haggen closed its converted California locations. Shortly after than Haggen filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Jewel was one of my first memories of Chicago. It's pretty much the most expensive store there now. Mariano's is cheaper but the quality did a nosedive once Kroger took over.

We used to trek out to the hinterlands to shop Woodman's.

Giant Eagle is an unremarkable store but always ridiculously expensive. And in some of the most economically challenged areas of the Rust Belt, too.

Always tried to avoid shopping it back in the day. Would wait for a chance to go to Shop n Save or Foodland.

Sendik’s!

And definitely Brown Bag Sendik’s over Red Bag Sendik’s.

I heard about the Murder Kroger when I visited.

There's also the UnSafeway in Denver.

[quote]if you really want to be totally triggered you should try shopping at a Stew Leonards

Stew's is great. Now I'm hungry.

King Soopers anyone?

Cash Wise?

Fry’s

Acme?

Giant?

Dillons?

Foodland (HI)

[Quote] Piggly Wiggly’s are vanishingly rare in most of the South these days

R71 That isn’t true.

You need to open your eyes and shop the Pig. 🐖

Chinese groceries for produce, noodles and specialty sauces . Italian bakeries for baked goods, arancini, sauce and grandmother pizza. Middle Eastern groceries for tzatzik, tabouleh, falafel , spinach feta pastries; Jewish delis for pastrami, corned beef, salads, knishes, bagels, challah, black and white cookies, babka; Vietnamese bakeries for wonderful baguettes.pastries and croissants; Polish delis for pierogis, soups, stufffed cabbage. German delis for sausages and cured meats.

I know these are not supermarkets and not available to everyone. I hit maybe one or two a week and freeze what I buy if I can.

Aldi for detergent, staples like jugs of white vinegar, organic produce, cheese and bronze cut pasta.

Wild Fork for bargains in wild-caught salmon and shrimp.

Costco for Cheeries, coffee, eggs, organic blueberries, paper goods, cleaning supplies.

WF for almost everything else, i.e. some organic produce, all meat and poultry, 365 house brand, bread goods..

We’re Food Lion and the call of the wild is in our hungry eyes. These are the times we must fight to keep our dreams alive.

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Lion