Published on: July 29, 2021
Content Guy's Note: Scott Moses, the managing director and head of grocery, pharmacy and restaurants at PJ Solomon, recently was kind enough to join me for a conversation to be used in the summer class I am team-teaching - remotely, because of continuing Covid-19 concerns - at Portland State University in Oregon.
During the conversation, we touched on topics that I think are highly relevant to the future of food retailing. Increasingly, it seems like there are two different industries - one dominated by Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, and Aldi, as well as Dollar General and Family Dollar, which are engaged in almost unprecedented expansion efforts, and another one that includes almost everyone else, most (though not all) of which are at a competitive disadvantage because of simple economics.
At the same time, we have a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that seems primed to start getting aggressive about antitrust rules. One of Scott's concerns, as explained in our conversation, is that a restive FTC could block the ability of smaller, traditional supermarkets to merge, which will make them even less able to compete, facing the same inexorable decline as the regional department store sector has over the past two decades.
When we were done, Scott and I agreed that the conversation would be a good one to share with the MNB community; after all, many readers are in the midst of fighting these competitive battles every day. Scott sees the current growth by non-traditional players as being an existential threat to many businesses, and in our conversation we talk about what retailers need to do to meet these challenges.
You can watch our chat here or listen to it as a podcast by downloading the audio file below.
One additional note …
I'm going to take tomorrow off, so I hope you enjoy my conversation with Scott Moses … have a great weekend … and I'll see you next week. (Unbelievably, next Monday is August 2 … we're well into the back nine of 2021. When did that happen?)
Slainte!
