Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
Issue link: https://sct.epubxp.com/i/390025
By Ian Ritter ShopperS at a grocery Store are unlikely to give much thought to a wrench or a socket set, or to any other type of hardware or home-improvement item, while they are there. If they hap- pen to, though, what they almost surely have in mind is making a trip to another store. Now ace hardware and some grocery store partners are teaming up to help save those shoppers that trip — and to enrich their own bottom lines in the process. ace and its supermarket collab- orators — independently owned stores and small chains — are building an ace unit onto a grocery store or setting up an ace store-within-a-store arrangement in a section of the supermarket. there are roughly 70 of these ace- grocery combos across the country at present — barely a ripple on the surface of the company's 4,700 units interna- tionally, but ace is taking the concept quite seriously. Last year the hardware company hired Mike Smith, a former executive at discount-grocery giant Su- pervalu, as its grocery channel manager. So far 80 percent of these combination units are store-within-a-store arrange- ments, but most of the newly developed ones have side-by-side ace stores and supermarkets, and that is the direction in which the company would like to go. ace has been focusing on indepen- dents and small regionals because the company sees the biggest need in the market with those types of retailers, which are trying to compete against much larger grocery companies. these smaller businesses are also more nimble than large corporations and can adopt initiatives like this ace partnership with relatively little red tape. their stores tend to be more involved with their localities, too, and are thought of as true neighborhood or small-town gro- cers — an image with which ace identi- fies, given that the vast majority of its r e t a i l i n g t o d a y Ace Hardware pairs with supermarkets 36 S C t / O c t O b e r 2 0 1 4 COPLEY SQUARE UNION SQUARE or Bialow takes you where you need to be. Our experienced team is skilled at tailoring a regional or national expansion plan that meets each retailer's individual needs. 781.444.2316 | www.bialow.com