Safeway Inc. SWOT Analysis

adam April 13, 2011 Retailing 1 Comment

Safeway is public driven company retailing grocery items in North America. The company being a part of Fortune 500 Companies is the third largest among American food chains. The company was founded in 1915 and its headquarters are based in Pleasanton, California, United States. The company name was among the ‘top 75 most North American food retailers’.

Strengths

• Considering the facts the company as per retails stands at tenth number in United States.

• Safeway Inc. has a strong hold on the retail industry of Western Canada and Western and central united states.

• The company owns a huge number of 1743 stores concentrated in fewer locations, running successfully with human aid of 197,000 employees.

• The company has grown in international markets including Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Western Germany, Mexico and Saudi Arabia having 302, 131, 123, 35, 137 and 6 stores in the above mentioned countries respectively.

• The company ATM Network operated by card tonics has been very old and has expanded over time.

• A strong presence of customer support offices in California, Colorado, Arizona, and Philippines but the expansion is still required.

• The company has maximized the private labeled products on its shelves and offers range of up scaled products like deli and dairy.

• Safeway has also introduced fuel at some of its stores giving a sort of fuel discount on loyalty card for grocery purchases and vice versa.

Weaknesses

• The company has been selling off its various units to pay off its debts that were supposed against the bidding by the company.

• The company’s acquiring the divisions of Safeway also entered into the darker situation of financial crisis.

• The company store formats have never been appealing and had gone through a number of formatting but the ultimate results has been accompanied with complete failure.

• Safeway has been unable to reduce the monotony of its products range.

• The locations hired for the stores are comparatively heavier and considerably increases the company’s operational cost.

• Labor Union has been producing the adverse effects on the brand name as the stores remain seized because of untimely protest.

Opportunities

• O-Organics, a new line has been introduced in near past being the production line for organically processed products.

• The company’s original campaign that is ‘Ingredients for life’ has been introduced for producing the everlasting image of Brands name, initiating something different from its market foes. These rebranding stores were approximately 1000 in number.

• The company has also entered into a phase of providing the health facilities to the employees, through insurance plans for them.

• Through SCOP the company has positioned itself to national category rather than regional management category.

Threats

• Certain competitors like Tesco, Wal-Mart, Kroger, EDLP and EDLC operators are posing a great threat to the company as its progress is not at their pace.

• The company has made unjust heavy investments on the lifestyle stores, especially for their model formats.

• Minimum innovation in the Ecommerce sector, while the competitors are enjoying monopoly over there.

References

1. Official websites. www.safeway.com and www.safeway.ca. Retrieved on April 12, 2011.

2. 2007 Top 75 North American Food Retailers, Supermarket News.

3.Safeway stock out tomorrow, Los Angeles Times, Nov 14, 1926, p17.

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