What is in this article?:
- Food Lion Pricing Bounces Bottom Dollar
- 'Big Move for Food Lion'
“I think the converted stores can be credible [as Food Lions] as long as they remarket the stores and develop a consumer communication plan.”
— Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of Strategic Resource Group
'Big Move for Food Lion'
Andrew Wolf, an analyst following supermarket stocks at BB&T Capital Markets, Richmond, Va., noted that Food Lion only recently appeared to have made progress in pricing in his firm’s biweekly pricing studies. He said a 53-item basket analysis of prices at Wal-Mart, Kroger, Food Lion and Martin’s stores in the Richmond area showed Food Lion in the period ended Sept. 27 lowered prices sequentially by 4.5%, and by 5% compared with the same period a year ago. Food Lion also narrowed its spread vs. Wal-Mart in the period, while competitors saw theirs grow.
“This is the first real move we’ve seen from them to become more competitive. That’s a big sequential change and a big year-over-year change,” Wolf said. “We don’t know if this is a one-and-done or not, but it’s a big move for Food Lion.”
Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of Strategic Resource Group, New York, told SN he felt as though Bottom Dollar stores converted from Food Lion tended to be larger than ideal for a discounter. The conversion also suggested that Delhaize “had not been able to do multi-segment formatting as well as some others in the industry, like Kroger,” Flickinger added.
More news: Food Lion Revamps Hit Profits
“I think the converted stores can be credible [as Food Lions] as long as they remarket the stores and develop a consumer communication plan, especially as they go into the Halloween, Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s holidays,” Flickinger added. “They can gain some credibility as an everyday-low-price format.”
The conversions of the remaining Bottom Dollar stores in Virginia will leave Bottom Dollar with 54 stores in three states: New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio, all of which have opened over the last two years. The newest of these opened last week in the Juniata Park section of Philadelphia.
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