A&P's decline began when they realized that the market was changing and they had hundreds and hundreds of outdated stores with not enough capital to save them all, which led to their contraction over the course of several decades (their last 10 years could arguably be blamed on the Pathmark acquisition...which might've been why Acme never bought Pathmark wholesale).Ephrata1966 wrote:There just seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. They seem to select stores at random. Albertsons closed a number of stores that were very dated. One analyst said they closed too many. Most Acmes were done justice by Albertsons, but many tanked soon after. Why? And what about the closures before that? I would think Acme would have capitalized on A&P's Philadelphia exit, since the collapse of Food Fair/Penn Fruit helped Acme so much. Buying up A&P stores would not have worked though, since Acme already had #1 market share, and gobbled up so many Food Fair properties. The anti-trust authorities already had a problem with the size of American Stores. In fact did ANY A&Ps become Acme? New Jersey is absolutely littered with abandoned Acmes to this day. Perhaps that is more a reflection on poorer towns, and maybe some of these were considered relocations? (Camden, Clementon, Berlin, Egg Harbor City, Browns Mills, Paulsboro, Williamstown) Either way, these stores all were vacated between 1990 and 1995! Is that not kind of an embarrassment to Acme? Did they just let some stores get so old and tired that they were too expensive to justify upgrades? Are the unions that costly? Who has closed the biggest percentage of their chain? Acme has always been relatively small, so how do their cutbacks compare to Safeway and Kroger? All I know is that A&P has had trouble because they thought their monopoly in many areas (long ago) would last forever. No need for them to compete. I have heard that many A&Ps right before the Centennial/Colonial era were filthy bottom of the barrel stores.
Acme was never a whole chain like A&P or Safeway, and while American Stores focused on the moneymakers, like drug stores, Jewel-Osco, or Lucky, Acme declined, to the point where they put the chain up for sale in 1991, keeping it because the bids weren't high enough. So American Stores started repairing the chain itself, cutting out dated stores, and re-focusing it to be a modern supermarket, which was continued under Albertsons' control. SuperValu closed dozens of Acme stores, which was partially because they were struggling under the debt following the Albertsons deal,