Kroger, America’s biggest supermarket chain, has remodeled two stores to test out the new features, which include “digital shelves” that can show ads and change prices on the fly along with a network of sensors that keep track of products and help speed shoppers through the aisles.
Kroger Co., the biggest grocery player in the Indianapolis-area market, orders about 6 billion bags each year.
The Cincinnati-based grocery chain said the store, which employs 65, is unprofitable.
Kroger Co. and United Kingdom-based online grocer Ocado Group are working on identifying sites for three automated distribution centers in the United States this year and may open as many as 20 within three years.
Since the grocer bought seven former Indianapolis-area Marsh stores last July, it has reopened only a three.
The Cincinnati-based grocery chain instead is opting to renovate a much smaller existing grocery across the street from where the proposed store would have been built. The decision leaves a massive hole for Kite Realty Group to fill in Fishers Station shopping center.
When Marsh moved Larry Schultz out of its Mass Ave store years ago, customers threw a fit. Kroger was smart enough to make him manager of its new downtown store.
The stores employ 11,000 associates in 18 states and operate under the banners Turkey Hill, Loaf ‘N Jug, Kwik Shop, Tom Thumb and Quik Stop.
Chicago-based Mer Car Corp. owns the 95,700-square-foot strip center anchored by a Kroger, where Southeastern and English avenues meet, just west of where the justice center is set to be built.
The supermarket giant kicked off its biggest rally in more than two years after saying it might sell its convenience-store business. The operation spans 18 states, including Indiana, and generates about $4 billion in sales.
The newly created moniker is a nod to the Needler family of Findlay, Ohio, third generation grocers. The former Marsh stores are owned by Michael Needler Jr. and his sister, Julie Needler Anderson.
The internet juggernaut spent its first day as the owner of a brick-and-mortar grocery chain cutting prices at Whole Foods Market as much as 43 percent.
Kroger said it will first focus on reopening seven of the stores, spending $20 million on renovations.
Rather than featuring long, tall aisles like traditional groceries, the new-format stores featured a courtyard in the center with a dozen “boutiques” around the perimeter, each selling a certain category of goods.
The biggest U.S. supermarket chain lost more than $7 billion in market value combined on Thursday and Friday, the biggest two-day loss for the company since December 1999.
A lawsuit alleging Kroger stores in Indiana have for years knowingly failed to collect and remit state sales tax on hundreds of non-exempt food items and other goods will be heard in state court after a judge denied the grocers’ bid to transfer the suit to federal court.
Under the agreement, prospective store buyers Kroger and Fresh Encounter would be able to operate pharmacies at the locations much sooner than rival CVS expected.
CVS wants to prevent buyers from operating pharmacies. Lockerbie Marketplace's owners say Fresh Encounter has failed to demonstrate it has the financial wherewithal to "fully perform" under the Marsh lease it wants to take over in that shopping center.
For decades, Marsh Supermarkets has had a lock on the downtown grocery market. Proposed store sales disclosed Tuesday, combined with the impending opening of Whole Foods, set the stage for three-way showdown.
The deadline was Monday for the company to identify a so-called stalking horse bidder, which would make an initial offer for the grocer's assets that any other suitor would have to beat. Bidders for the business still could emerge, but time is running out.
