Localization among top Meijer priorities

Meijer co-chairman and ceo Hank Meijer and president Mark Murray sat down with Retailing Today senior editor Mike Duff at the FMI Show last month to discuss the company’s localized merchandising strategy and how suppliers can help it reach its goals. The discussion also ranged from chain growth to prototype development, including the company’s new “green” Allen Park, Mich., store. Excerpts from the conversation provide an impression about where Meijer is headed and for a fuller account of the company’s plans go tohttp://www.retailingtoday.com/dsnrt/surveys/ .

RT: Meijer wants to localize its merchandising and assortment to better serve the communities each store serves. How can suppliers help?

MURRAY: You have to edit for the customer. There is so much available. It’s no small thing to understand the consumer better through their eyes. Working with our national partners, we have exactly the same interest in the capacity to localize our stores. They have the same interest in that localization question.

RT: You are remodeling the Alpine store in Grand Rapids, which was one of your prototypes a few years ago. What is changing there?

MURRAY: It’s easier to shop. Lower gondolas, clearer site line, simpler signage. Our manufacturing friends are learning from us that we’re getting an additional strength in our commitment to really owning the signage and display in our own stores, so occasionally, when they come with ideas that would not match our standards, there’s a quicker response from us. We see real value in cleaning up sightlines, simpler signage, lower, more open, easier to shop …

MEIJER: … bringing health and beauty care to the front so the whole feel-good area of health and beauty is taken forward …

MURRAY: … bigger pet section. Pet obviously has taken off in a lot of places and that’s going well for us.

RT: With your new Allen Park store, is the environmental character defined more by new merchandising and product assortment or is the main thrust in the building and site?

MEIJER: That’s our first LEED-certified building, so that’s about the construction and the site development. The merchandising will have the full array of organics but will essentially be the same as its counterpart stores.

RT: How does Allen Park speak to the consumer about Meijer’s commitment to sustainability?

MEIJER: To the extent that it’s LEED-certified, which is a first for us, I hope it speaks volumes about our interest in building environmentally sensitive stores. We’ve still got a lot of learning to do about the cost issues involved as we look at other buildings, but this is part of that learning process.

MURRAY: We’re getting a lot of learning out of it, whether it’s on the utilities, heating and cooling, water use, landscaping. I fully expect there will be significant elements out of the LEED-certified Allen Park store that help in other areas. I go back to my previous life at [Grand Valley State] university, when we got into LEED-certified buildings, it really helped us. Every time we did one of those projects it made us realize how you do the next project well. A really simple example of it is recycled building materials. We all know what a work site looks like with the load luggers going out the back and off to the dump. It turns out you can recycle 80%, 90% of building materials, and the main thing it takes is separation at the site, which really isn’t very hard. Instead of taking five runs of the same dumpster, you’ve got five dumpsters back there. It really isn’t that hard but until you’ve gone through the exercise, you don’t necessarily know it. So the learnings are coming, and we’ll see the benefits in other buildings. Whether we get to full LEED certification is a different matter. But there’s no question that there will be learnings from the environmental work we’ve done in the Allen Park stores for other constructions.

RT: Meijer has focused on filling in some major markets recently including Detroit, Chicago and Cincinnati, but what is the outlook for expansion into fresh markets?

MEIJER: A lot of that has to do with our rate of expansion, certainly, particularly when there is an opportunity to build a lot more stores in Chicago, and what opportunities remain within our existing footprint. I think the industry has discovered that, if you’ve got the right mix of products you can build the kinds of stores we operate closer together than people once thought. We’ve seen a lot of our largest competitors doing a lot more of that so we’ve been able to find more opportunities within our existing footprint than we imagined there were 10 years ago.