Food Lion
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Food Lion is an American grocery store chain with over 1,220 stores found in 11 Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, including Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Serving these stores are 485 Food Lion semi trucks driving 52 million miles per year. There are more than 28,000 different products offered in each store, and more than 2,900 Food Lion brand products. Food Lion receives more than 10 million customers every week, and employs approximately 73,000 people. Food Lion is headquartered in Salisbury, North Carolina and is a part of the Belgian Delhaize Group.
History
Food Lion was founded in 1957 in Salisbury, North Carolina as Food Town. The Food Lion name was adopted when it began expanding into areas where the name Food Town was already being used by other chains.Food Lion aggressively expanded throughout the Carolinas, and entered Virginia in the 1980's. As time passed, they would also expand into Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Georgia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Food Lion's main concept is provided around building small, convenient supermarkets for its customers, featuring "extra low prices" on name brand and private label merchandise. Food Lion's concept generally lacks all the bells and whistles of its competitors. Only some recent stores and stores of acquisition have pharmacies, and some older and smaller stores lack a deli or bakery. Its small footprint allows it to build many stores in a large metropolitan area, As well as to open up stores in small, underserved towns where its competitors see no opportunity. Food Lion, in some of these towns, is the only supermarket serving such a community.
Food Lion expanded throughout the East Coast, but negative publicity hurt the chain as it attempted to enter the Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Florida marketplaces, and restricted the chain's growth.
The chain remains strong in Virginia and North Carolina especially, and is strong in specific parts of the other states in its trade area.
In 2004, Food Lion closed some of its stores throughout the country, as the "Extra Low Prices" model it created was showing signs of weakness, as Wal-Mart Supercenters began operating throughout its trade area. Since then, Food Lion has changed the direction of its stores, moving more upscale, providing more ethnic and organic foods, a new Butcher's Brand of premium meats, as well as incorporating better ambiance in its stores, going with a more refined, classy look.
Food Lion started their MVP loyalty card program in the 1990's, like many supermarket chains, connecting it to their weekly ad savings. The chain has used the MVP card to do promotions for free hams, free turkeys, promotions with their sponsorship of NASCAR, and to receive gift certificates, most recently for their Butcher's Brand premium beef.
Food Lion typically does have lower prices than competitors, but this comes at a reduction of services and amenities. Food Lion does offer many conventional services however, such as Western Union (some locations), propane exchange, and Rug Doctor.
Bloom
Bloom is a concept store being test marketed in the Charlotte, North Carolina area.[link] The first of five test stores opened on May 26 2004. The concept is based on the idea of using a slightly unconventional layout to maximize shopper convenience.Bloom stores are currently expanding into the Washington, DC Metro Area and Upstate South Carolina [link].
Reid's
Reid's is a small chain of stores located in various rural South Carolina communities, specifically [Barnwell], Orangeburg, [Langley], [New Ellenton], [Batesburg], [Walterboro], St. George, and [Saluda]. These stores were all formerly branded as Food Lion stores and continue to carry Food Lion branded goods and use the Food Lion infrastructure. The common theme to these stores appears to be that they are all older stores which Food Lion has apparently determined are located in markets small enough to make enlarging or opening a new store unprofitable, but which with a different brand name to differentiate them from Food Lion so that the prices and selection can be different from a standard Food Lion store can still be profitably run without remodeling. One exception to this standard is the Langley location, which was converted from a new Food Lion store which had been open for only a few months.Reid's apparently has no web presence and advertises mainly via newspaper ads with occasional television ads when a new store "opens". However, you can view the Reid's weekly ad on the website of [The People-Sentinel], a newspaper serving [Barnwell County], SC. Reid's also runs sale advertisements on several radio stations in South Carolina, featuring the chain's namesake Reid Boylston reading the week's specials over the phone and closing with an exuberant recitation of the chain's slogan, "We can save you money!"
Bottom Dollar
Food Lion has been busy quietly developing a new grocery store pilot based on a back-to-basics shopping environment that is deep in product at discount prices. The new stores, called [Bottom Dollar], are between 25,000 to 30,000 square feet, and carry fresh produce, meats, national and private label brands, prepackaged products all at discount prices. Food Lion opened the first Bottom Dollar model in High Point, N.C. on Sept. 21 2005, and is now in the process of building a third store, planned to open in Asheboro, N.C. A Food Lion in Hickory, NC, has reopened as a Bottom Dollar.Bottom Dollar now has stores opening up in the Washington D.C. area as of June 2006.
Primetime Live
In the 1990s, Food Lion gained a degree of notoriety when it was the subject of an ABC News investigation. ABC had received a tip about unsanitary practices at Food Lion. Two ABC reporters had posed as Food Lion employees, and witnessed the unsanitary practices at Food Lion. Much of what they had seen was videotaped with cameras hidden in wigs that they were wearing.Food Lion was then featured in a segment on the news magazine Primetime Live, in which their unsanitary practices were exposed.
Food Lion responded by suing ABC for fraud, because the ABC employees misrepresented themselves; for trespassing, because the ABC employees came on to Food Lion property without permission; and for breach of loyalty, the ABC employees videotaped non-public areas of the store and revealed internal company information.
Food Lion was awarded USD$5.5 million by a jury in 1997. The award was later reduced by a judge to $316,000. Then the verdict was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. According to the court, even though ABC was wrong to do what they had done, they felt that Food Lion was unable to show that they had been directly injured by ABC's actions.
An indirect result was that Food Lion ended up exiting the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex market, which it had recently entered. The Dallas/Fort Worth market is highly competitive, and the stores were already being criticized for being too small and lacking the amenities desired by the local shoppers—for example, Food Lion did not include pharmacies in its stores.
The ensuing bad publicity led Food Lion to [shut down] 84 stores over the next two years, throwing thousands of employees out of work.
Outtakes of the hidden-camera footage showed that the charges leveled against Food Lion were a manufactured fraud. One showed an ABC producer taking chickens whose ``sell-by'' dates had expired and putting them up for sale, then telling another producer to videotape them.
Another outtake showed a producer ignoring instructions from legitimate employees on how to handle food. In another, one producer sells a piece of moldy kielbasa to an ABC employee several times for the benefit of the camera.
One piece of videotape that did air showed a dirty meat slicer, even though it was the undercover producer's job to clean it.
In a glaring example of deception by ABC, a Food Lion employee talked about how she had cooked a batch of out-of-date chicken by mistake. That footage aired. But in the portion of the video tape that had been cut out, the employee related being told by her manager to throw the cooked chicken out, which she did.
Many of the discarded video sequences featured producers' frustration at their inability to come up with incriminating footage. In one case, the ABC team reacts with the word,"shit", when a Food Lion employee starts to clean a meat slicer that had gotten dirty.
The Producer in charge of the Food Lion segment, Rick Kaplan, soon left ABC to take charge of CNN.
External links
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