I know, I know, another California post already -- but I have a good reason for posting this now. Earlier this week, the Save Mart group (including Lucky and FoodMaxx) was sold to a company readers of this blog will be familiar with -- the Jim Pattison Group from Vancouver, BC! This is a pretty big jump for Jim Pattison, both in that much further from their western Canada than most of their existing operations and in that Save Mart is about the same size as their entire existing grocery operation. I never would have guessed that Save Mart and Save-On would become part of the same company! It seems that Jim Pattison is quite interested into expanding into the US market, and I'll be interested to see what their next move is -- especially since they've completely jumped over Washington so far!
It is not entirely true that Jim Pattison skipped over Washington as they did buy the Chuck's Produce & Street Market chain which operates in Vancouver, WA. Now, granted, I think that is a whopping two stores (at least one of which is in a former Albertsons if I remember correctly from my research last year) and perhaps some Washingtonians don't consider Vancouver to really be a part of Washington, lol.
ReplyDeleteBoth Chuck's of Vancouver and Roth's of Salem, OR are higher-end supermarkets so hopefully Jim Pattison does not start running them like they are Save Marts! The Roth's stores especially are worth keeping intact given they were inspired by Tom Thumb's Simon David stores based on comments from Roth's own people when they still owned the chain. Plus, some of them do have the upstairs wedding halls which is very strange for a supermarket to have!
Whoops, I completely missed that! Seems like most sources (and even the Pattison Food Group's own website) gloss over Chuck's or treat it as part of Roth's.
DeleteJim Pattison has experience with both upscale and discount stores up in BC, so hopefully they'll be able to keep both types separate in the US market too! Since the new Save Mart stores are quite a distance from their existing operations, I doubt much will be done to combine operations any time soon, especially since there are so few Roth's/Chuck's stores that I doubt it would make sense to expand Save Mart's distribution operations to cover them. Salem is actually closer to Vancouver than it is to Save Mart's current northernmost store!