Grocery Outlet is on a mission to spruce up its store fleet and round out its assortment for a fuller grocery shop. Its newest store showcases the discounter’s efforts while maintaining its reputation for a treasure-hunt shopping experience.
Last week, Grocery Outlet arrived in Virginia with the opening of a store in Falls Church, a city in the greater Washington, D.C., area. The discounter has more than 560 locations across the country and plans to remodel existing stores, as well as open new locations, under a refreshed format that puts produce closer to the front entrance.
As Grocery Outlet fine-tunes its store design and expands its presence in new and existing markets, the discount chain — as evidenced by the newly opened location — is making its value proposition crystal clear to consumers.
Grocery Dive attended the Falls Church store’s grand opening last week. Here’s a peek inside.
The fun entrance
The Falls Church store has two entrances. The colorful produce department greets shoppers coming from the parking garage, while customers entering from the street are met with wine and the aisle housing chips and sodas.
This Grocery Dive reporter, who has a reputation for covering the booze news, obviously stepped into the store at the fun entrance — and immediately wondered why more grocery stores don’t give wine a more prominent placement.
The shopper journey from that entrance is the reverse of how most customers are used to browsing stores, but entering from the produce side would take them on the traditional grocery shopping path. Dairy and meat products were in refrigerated areas on the back wall, while the center aisles included essentials such as baking ingredients, cooking supplies, ramen and pasta.
Along with the full-shop assortment, the store sported wide aisles and five staffed checkout lanes.
How low can the prices go?
$1.99 for a dozen large eggs. $1.48 for white or wheat bread. $0.49 cents per pound for bananas.
Grocery Outlet has really low prices, and the in-store signage — from endcaps to product tags and overhead signs — is almost exclusively devoted to calling out these deals. In keeping with the red and yellow color scheme, “Hot Deals” signs pointed out some discounts, such as two Hass avocados for $1.
While the signage doesn’t name-drop competitors, Grocery Outlet still aims to showcase how much consumers can save by noting an “elsewhere” price.
Stocking up on private label
Grocery Outlet prides itself on what it calls a “treasure hunt” experience, fueled by products that it gets from its opportunistic buying model. The Falls Church store didn’t disappoint: there was Dolly Parton sugar cookie mix, Califia Farms holiday nog almondmilk, beet latte mix, Ben & Jerry’s sugar cookie dough bites and even some Harry Potter-inspired plushies. Instead of magazines and gum, the checkout lanes sported charging cables and earbuds as the last-minute impulse buys.
Amid these fun, surprising finds, though, Grocery Outlet has filled out its assortment with its Simply GO private label items. The store-brand Alfredo pasta sauce was on the bottom shelf in the pasta aisle. Private label butter and cheese, including mild cheddar, sharp cheddar, mozzarella and Monterey Jack, took up ample space in the dairy aisle. Meanwhile, in the condiments section, three of seven shelves filled with mayonnaise were devoted to the Simply GO brand.
Carving out space in a competitive market
The Falls Church location is a particularly crowded market for Grocery Outlet to enter, as Aldi, Whole Foods Market and Harris Teeter stores are all within walking distance of the discounter’s newest store.
But much like Aldi hasn’t shied away from opening within a stone’s throw from Walmart, Grocery Outlet’s choice of location shows that the discounter is ready to hold its own against a range of grocery competitors.
