Market Supermarket

The title of this article may be a bit ambiguous. There are, of course, no (or few if any at all) supermarkets that are called Market Supermarkets. So this article is not about a chain with that name. Rather, it is a more general assessment of what is going on in the supermarket world: how do supermarkets fair today and how do they market themselves.

Supermarkets sell food items and other things – cleaning supplies, paper towels, toilet paper rolls, tooth brushes and tooth pastes, mouth washes, over-the-counter medicines, etc. If you have ever been in a supermarket (and who hasn’t been?) you don’t need a list of what you are going to find there. You may even know a few really big ones that sell other items, such as clothing or electronics or even appliances (certainly most of them have coffee makers or toasters and the like).

A supermarket, in short, is an urban or suburban shopping place for food and other household items. Today’s economy means that each neighborhood supermarket is in competition with each of its counterparts near and far. Many of them are doing something about this the way they market themselves. They may run ads in newspapers or on local TV stations where they claim to offer the best things for less. So quality plus low cost is the name of the game, for the most part.

Many a supermarket offers its own brands for a lot of items for which people know the national brands. Skippy peanut butter is a national brand. Can a local store offer its own version? I haven’t really seen this. But I have seen, say, a local brand tomato juice alongside the national brand of, say, Hunt’s tomato juice with identical ingredients. This phenomenon may be the same for other items where a given chain uses its own brand with ingredients that are identical to the national brands of the same items.

Some may question whether individual chains may actually have their own brands, but the fact is that they may make deals with certain manufacturers to put out identical products using the name of a chain rather than the name of the national brand. Be that as it may, the fact is that to be a supermarket chain means competition with other markets as well as with other supermarket chains.

Still, it seems that most of the chains survive and even thrive. Where I live, for example, there are three supermarkets within five-minute  drives of each other as well as a Wal-Mart superstore nearby. Only one of the supermarkets in question seems to have few cars in its parking lot. All the other supermarkets seem to be doing just fine.

One of the keys to the success of a supermarket is to be located in a densely populated neighborhood with ample parking spaces. When there are a lot of people living near a store, chances are that most of them are going to do their shopping in that store. After all, saving money on gas as well as on groceries is in everyone’s interest in today’s troubled economy.