Reflecting a major shift in the way Americans shop for food, retailers better known for selling clothes or aspirin are expanding in a big way into the grocery business with fresh produce and frozen meats.
As a result, people who typically went to the grocery store once a week to stock up are instead stopping by places whose food items used to be limited to a bag of chips or a can of soup. Retailers are viewing it as an opportunity to increase sales by getting people in their stores more frequently. “It’s going to be a big food fight in the sense that you’re going to have so many people going after this sector,” Bill Dreher, a retail analyst with Deutsche Bank, told The New York Times.
Like the grocers, the convenience stores and discount stores are not making a lot of money on their groceries. Instead, the goal is to draw more customers, and it seems to be working.