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Food Lion Unveils New Bottom Dollar Stores

Posted on: Thursday, 15 June 2006, 18:00 CDT

By Cathy Jett, The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va.

Jun. 15--Stafford County resident Louise Boxley was so eager to see the changes Food Lion had made to its Ferry Farm store that she showed up right when it reopened yesterday morning as Bottom Dollar.

But one look at the crowd of 50 or so shoppers already lined up outside the doors persuaded her to come back a few hours later.

"I think everyone from Ferry Farm and Fredericksburg was here," laughed Boxley, who came back around 11 a.m. to shop for trash bags, Downey and a few impulse buys.

She'd been a regular at the old Food Lion in Ferry Farm Shopping Center, and was pleased to see the store's peppy new color scheme of tan, orange and green, plus the low prices in its roomy "While Supplies Last" section.

"Oh, Lord! Bananas at 35 cents a pound!" she said, spotting a mound of the yellow fruit. "That's cheap. This store is going to be great!" The old Ferry Farm store is one of three that parent company Food Lion LLC just finished converting to a Bottom Dollar. The others, which also opened yesterday, are in Fredericksburg Shopping Center in the city and Breezewood Shopping Centre in Spotsylvania County.

Bottom Dollar, aimed at value-conscious shoppers, is one of two new concepts Food Lion LLC is using to diversify and give shoppers a reason not to patronize a broad range of competitors.

The other grocery rollout is Bloom, which is being billed as a "lifestyle" store featuring such things as Meal of the Week recipes with all the ingredients grouped together and an organic foods section called "Nature's Place." Six Fredericksburg-area Food Lions will be converted into Blooms by this fall. The rest will remain Food Lions, and Food Lion executives expect that many of its customers will shop at all three types of stores.

Bottom Dollars are designed to compete with discounters such as Wal--Mart Supercenters, but in a decidedly undiscount-like atmosphere.

For starters, the stores are designed to be a fun, light-hearted place where checkers wear orange or green T--shirts with sayings such as "Black-belt in price chopping" on the back, and the wording over the meat case reads "More Moo for the Moo-lah.""I think, traditionally, people think of a discounter as having places that are drab," Tom Anderson, Bottom Dollar's director of operations, said during a tour of the Ferry Farm store yesterday. "We wanted to create a different feel than a supercenter." That includes making Bottom Dollars easier to shop. Shelving units, for example, are about 10 inches lower than in traditional Food Lions so customers can more easily reach items on the topmost shelf.

"I spent a lot of time in Asia, where I saw people having to stand on the bottom shelf to reach things on top," said Peter Brodbeck, Bottom Dollar's vice president, during the tour. "I thought, 'How can we make shopping more comfortable?' Also, it opens up the store and makes it much brighter. You can see the signs to navigate." The stores also feature a "While Supplies Last" section, where bargain buys are displayed mainly on pallets rolled right off the truck; and "Bottom Bargains," which are part dollar-type store, part treasure trove of seasonal merchandise such as large Coleman coolers marked $20 each.

Other items in the store carry an "Everyday Prices" label, which means just what it says. Customers who pick up 2-liter bottles of Coke marked 5 for $5 one week, for example, will be able to find it at the same price six months later. That's one thing people in focus groups told Food Lion LLC they'd like to see, Anderson said.

Bottom Dollars, however, stock only 6,500 different items compared to the 25,000 to 30,000 in a Food Lion.

"That 6,500 are the best-selling items, the best-selling national brands and the best-selling private labels," Anderson said. "Jell--O is a good example.

You could have a whole shelf of Jell--O. We go through and say, 'What are the top-selling flavors?' That 25 percent of items makes it to our shelves." That selectivity helps Bottom Dollar not only sell those items faster, but lessens the chances that they'll get damaged or pass their expiration date.

And that, in turn, helps trim its costs.

Other money-savers include stocking shelves with items still in the boxes they were shipped in, then recycling them as the containers shoppers use to haul away their purchases.

Bottom Dollar also carries only prepackaged bakery and deli items instead of having a bakery/deli in house. That cuts down on the number of staff needed and the amount of food that needs to be tossed, Anderson said.

But the stores do have butchers on-site who can do custom cuts for shoppers who want, say, a thicker rib-eye steak than what they found in the refrigerated case.

Like many groceries, Bottom Dollar also requires shoppers to sign up for a free customer-loyalty card. It is used to help fine tune what the chain--and individual stores--offer. And it will allow it to tailor the incentives it offers customers based on their preference patterns.

Bottom Dollar also will beat other store's prices by a penny if customers alert checkers that they could find a better deal elsewhere--including Food Lion.

"We were worried about that at first," Anderson said of the difference in Bottom Dollar and Food Lion's prices. "We actually have talking points for both stores. Customers got it. They can understand that they get a lot of the services and extra things at Food Lion that are not available here." Still, Bottom Dollar's low prices are likely to have an impact on prices at other discount and grocery stores in the area, he said.

Competitors checked out the concept when it débuted in North Carolina, and responded by slashing prices on some items. And people from competing stores were already in the Bottom Dollars here when they opened yesterday, Anderson said.

"Really, if I thought about it from an industry point of view, we are forcing prices down," he said. "When that happens, the customer wins."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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DEG, DELB,

Source: The Free Lance-Star

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