Apocapublix Now: Publix Reaches the Heart of Darkness

Publix is Coming!

One of the things I love about grocery retailers is that the landscape is always changing.? In addition, a retailer moving into a competitor’s backyard is always exciting.? Privately and employee-owned Publix recently announced more details around their planned incursion in the heart of America’s largest pure grocer, Kroger’s backyard ($148 billion in sales ).? The?$54.5 billion in sales ?(2022) Florida-based grocery chain operates 1322 supermarkets in seven southeastern U.S. states.? Publix's first store in the Cincinnati area will be in the?Northern Kentucky ?suburb of Union, Kentucky.? The almost half-million-person “Northern Kentucky” area is part of the Cincinnati Metropolitan Area (MSA) and if it was considered a separate city or MSA, it would be Kentucky’s second largest behind?Louisville .

The K in Michigan when it is not Kmart

What intrigues me about retail incursion is thirty years ago I relocated from the Deep South to Michigan and the only Walmart store in the state was located an hour's drive from my suburban Detroit apartment in a rural town called Howell, Michigan.? I recall one of my co-workers warning me Howell was “Klu Klux Klan” territory and that I had “better be careful”.? I went anyway because I needed a BBQ/smoker grill and good southern-style smokers were hard to come by in Michigan in those days.? The point is Kmart was headquartered sixty miles from Howell.? Walmart patiently opened up more stores in a ring roughly fifty to sixty miles around Kmart HQ before finally adding more stores in the Metro Detroit area.? Walmart was like an anaconda snake slowly constricting its prey before eating it. ? And yes I did find my smoker.

What reduced Kmart to the zombie retailer that it is today was not all Walmart’s doing.? Thirty years ago I was on P&G’s then second largest retail team in the Kmart Team.? As an Operations Manager, I flew all over the country working with our field sales reps who called on Kmart.??

What was stunning was how the further I traveled from Kmart’s Michigan home base, the more chaotic and disorganized the stores became.? Besides seeing more out of stocks and poor execution, the stores were generally older, smaller, and not as clean as the Michigan stores.? Net what was working in Michigan did not always translate well in the far-flung stores of the enterprise.??

Assuming the Michigan stores were where Kmart leadership shopped on a daily basis, it is not surprising they were the best stores in the chain including a number of their larger Super Kmart supercenters and test stores.? Coincidentally that is what operators like Walmart do so well.? They go where their customer goes; i.e., establish test stores not just in their home market, but in markets that meet their customer testing criteria thresholds.?

The Apocapublix

My experience calling on Kmart reminded me of my high school reading of Robert Conrad’s 1899 novella, “The Heart of Darkness”.? If you are not familiar with the book, you may be familiar with Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” movie which was loosely based on “The Heart of Darkness”.? What both the book and movie had in common besides the antagonist having the same name of “Kurtz”, was they both had a river that ran through a colonized territory that became increasingly more dark and foreboding the further you traveled upriver to the point that the protagonist began feeling squeezed in and started taking on the psychotic effects of his surroundings. An underlying premise of both the book and movie is the increasing horrors of degradation, decay, and chaos a colonizing entity or organization creates the further it moves away from its base not only impacting the organization but also those to whom the organization is colonizing. ? The days I would visit a far-flung Kmart store like the one I saw in San Antonio, Texas where I would see something unexpected like one of the associates trying to chase a flying bat with a broom in the lobby of the store would always make me relate the experience to something out of “Apocalypse Now”.

Colonizing Kentucky

While Publix won’t be “colonizing” Northern Kentucky, at least not anytime soon.? It still begs the question of how well will their brand equity of strong customer service translate outside the southeastern U.S.? Think Southwest Airlines before venturing north of the Mason-Dixon line.? My wife only recently started flying Southwest and she keeps commenting following Southwest West Coast - Midwest flights, “I thought Southwest was supposed to be the?‘Fun’ airline”.? I always reply with my ‘n’ of one data point, “Southwest was more ‘fun’ when it was exclusive to the South”.? Those of us from the South, also know Walmart greeters used to actually greet people with a smile and welcome too!? Just call me biased.

Some folks say Northern Kentucky is the “South'', but I was hard-pressed to find grits and biscuits on the menus in Northern Kentucky.? Northern Kentucky is more like the “near-midwest” and being a suburb of Cincinnati they too, like to eat Cincinnati-style chili over their spaghetti noodles and like lots of sugar in their pizza sauce!??

The first new Publix store in Northern Kentucky will be built near the Toney Triple Crown Country Club golf course community that prides itself as “Cincinnati’s most family-friendly country club”.? The single-family homes in Triple Crown start at $240,000 and go up to over $2 million.? Triple Crown sounds and feels like a Publix kind of neighborhood and not surprisingly Kroger already has several defensive moat “Marketplace” supercenter style stores nearby including one that features its own adjacent Kroger-owned restaurant called “Kitchen 1883”.? While Kitchen 1883 serves everything from Flatbread to Warm Mushroom Ricotta Dip, there are no grits on the brunch menu, but they do have biscuits and gravy!

“Let’s Go Krogering”

I have a huge respect for Kroger.? When I was in third grade my family moved from Chicago’s south suburbs to the Deep South (Baton Rouge, Louisiana). ? We had a Kroger nearby and we went “Krogering” as a family every Sunday evening.? I always looked forward to those trips as Kroger was like an island of familiar Midwestern virtue in a sea of Southern hospitality.? It was my first brush with Kroger and while it did not last long.? Kroger eventually shuttered their south Louisiana stores in?1983 ?following prolonged store losses and a labor strike.

The good news for Kroger is they have avoided the pitfalls of many of their bygone competitors like A&P.? When they make acquisitions they have avoided turning them into an all-out Kroger doppelganger, instead focusing on maintaining and fostering the strengths of the acquisitions and in some cases maintaining the store branding.

Kroger also knows how to translate well outside of their home market.? There is no “Apocalypse Now” chaos and decay where I live 2152 miles from Kroger HQ.? I live two blocks from a Raph’s Signature store in downtown San Diego.? Ralph’s is one of Kroger’s two Southern California chains.? When I miss the Midwest, I go into that store, and except the name outside the building and the upscaling of select regional food favorites; i.e., deli baked chicken has a grilled smoked flavor, it looks, feels, and smells like a Cincinnati Kroger.? Even the service is on par with their home base stores.? Overall it seems to be working for them as Kroger has continued to avoid the “Heart of Darkness” Achilles heel here and in other far-flung markets.

Not surprisingly Publix incursion is not Kroger’s first rodeo.? They experienced strong overtures of incursion from Walmart in their home market in the late 1980s and early 1990s as Walmart encircled the Cincinnati I-275 beltway highway.? Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Super Center pioneer, Meijer soon followed and Cincinnati quickly became an orgy of grocery retail.? Kroger has held their ground well in their home market, showing a?46.6% market share ?in 2022, well above second-place Walmart at 18.9%, but as of 2010, Kroger did lose market share to Publix in the coveted Atlanta market.

Speaking of Atlanta, when I was on Coca-Cola’s Kroger Team I would travel to Coke’s Atlanta HQ several times a year to meet with my Sales and Marketing counterparts.? Unanimously and without solicitation I would always hear from my ATL counterparts the same refrain, “I don’t shop at Kroger, I shop at Publix”.? When I would ask them why?? Unanimously they would all say similar rationale:? despite the prices being higher (relative to other retailers), the stores are cleaner and they have great customer service.

Pub Subs for Y’all

Time will tell how Publix fares in one of its most far-flung markets in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky market area.? If there is any indication on how this plays out, one only has to look to one of Northern Kentucky’s most enduring landmark’s, a large red and white water tower that sits directly below the flight path of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.? Despite what I said about Northern Kentucky not being of the South, this water tower reads, “Florence Y’all” in big bodacious letters. Florence is about the local town that is adjacent to Publix's future store’s new home in Union, Kentucky.? The water tower is probably the most southern thing in Northern Kentucky and of course, it comes with its own story.??

The water tower’s story is it was originally painted with the words “Florence Mall” in 1972 as it was built adjacent to a new mall under construction called, you guessed it, Florence Mall.? Kentucky’s Highway Beautification Act prohibited billboards along rural interstate highways.? You read that right.? If you drive across Kentucky or Ohio, particularly in rural areas, you will see limited billboards, unlike you do in neighboring states like Indiana.? So the mayor of Florence had white paint painted over the ‘M’ and changed “Mall" to “Y’all”.? Now everyone driving north on the ten-lane I-71/-I-75 sees a large water tower with the words “Florence Y’all”.??

I honestly don’t think there is much “Y’all” in Publix.? Publix is a hype beast that grew out of tourist-laden Florida where they are experts in catering to the throngs of tourists and steady snowbird traffic from the Midwest and Northeast with mountains of beach chairs and colorful inflatables along with a helping of groceries.? Publix has carefully curated their expansion with a patient eye and they know what they are doing.? Kroger will have to make adjustments to fortify their home market position and no one knows that market better than they do.? Publix will thoroughly do its homework and will build personalization into the new stores from the architecture to the customer service.? If there is anything certain, it is that there will be no “apocalypse” or “heart of darkness” for the residents of Northern Kentucky as they will soon have more choices and now that Publix is almost in town, maybe they will be able to buy creamy southern style grits with their breakfast Pub Subs!