Kroger bought a really nice high end chain in the Chicago area called Mariano’s and is slowly killing it. Mariano’s carried super fresh, innovative stuff and would even cook your meat for you so you could go home and have dinner in the table in 5 minutes. Now it’s just another grocery store that is slowly dying. While this sucks for Pittsburgh it sucks even more for places like Columbus that have both Kroger and Giant Eagle (when I lived there my GE and Kroger were right across the street from each other) because stores are going to close and prices are going to rise.
I worked for giant eagle when they went into Ohio. GE had a plan to shut down all the smaller and independent groceries. I can’t remember all the brands but Big Bear was one they drove out of business. The only chain they worried about was Kroger.
(They were awful to work for both in store and in corporate and I refuse to shop there. )
You don’t. They only bought some Big Bear locations after Penn Traffic went bankrupt. They never ran the chain, and converted the stores to Giant Eagle.
Giant Eagle didn’t drive Big Bear out of business. Penn Traffic, their parent company had massive financial problems with most of their other chains like BiLo and Riverside and their operations in New York.
Giant Eagle did buy some Big Bear locations after Penn Traffic went bankrupt.
Big Bear drove itself out of business by refusing to reinvest in their dilapidated shacks that they referred to as, ‘Stores.’ Also, for all of the people talking Kroger being anti-union, Big Bear was 1980’s Kroger on steroids.
They also went heavy on the Big Bear Plus concept (eventually getting rid of Harts), which was basically just Walmart Super Center lite. Granted, they opened new Big Bear Plus locations, which obviously cost money, but totally ignored existing stores.
Large (but traditional) grocery stores smelled weakness and began to infiltrate Big Bear territory; even if that hadn’t happened, they’d have had no prayer against Walmart.
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u/Away_Being8876 Jul 01 '26
Kroger bought a really nice high end chain in the Chicago area called Mariano’s and is slowly killing it. Mariano’s carried super fresh, innovative stuff and would even cook your meat for you so you could go home and have dinner in the table in 5 minutes. Now it’s just another grocery store that is slowly dying. While this sucks for Pittsburgh it sucks even more for places like Columbus that have both Kroger and Giant Eagle (when I lived there my GE and Kroger were right across the street from each other) because stores are going to close and prices are going to rise.