Giant Eagle
Vorlage:Infobox Company Giant Eagle, Inc. is a grocery store with stores located in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Maryland, USA. Giant Eagle was founded in 1918 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has continued to grow. It was the 34th largest privately-held corporation, as determined by Forbes in 2005. [1]
History
Eagle Grocery was founded by the families of Goldstein/Shapira, Porter, and Chait in 1918 in Pittsburgh. In 1928, the families sold the Eagle Grocery company to the Kroger Company. In 1931, however, the families regained ownership of the Eagle Grocery stores and combined with the Moravitz and Weizenbaum families' OK Grocery chain to form Giant Eagle. The chain continued to prosper through the 1930s and 1940s, even through both the Great Depression and World War II. In the 1950s, the average size of a store at that time was 15,000 ft².
Like many grocery chains, Giant Eagle ran a trading stamp program, which they called "Profit Sharing Blue Stamps", leading to strong sales growth for a time. They eliminated the program in the 1960s to focus on a simple low-price strategy, and in the 1970s advertised a pledge that it had the lowest prices of all the grocery stores. In recent years, Giant Eagle introduced "Advantage Card", an electronic loyalty card discount system popular in many chains as a sophisticated version of the obsolete stamp programs.
In 2004, Giant Eagle acquired and reopened several former Big Bear stores in Ohio (including about six in Columbus, Ohio alone) when Big Bear went out of business. The company is also rumored to be considering a relationship with regional department/grocery store chain Meijer in an attempt to expand in the Midwest.
Current status
Currently there are 219 store locations in the United States: 100 in Western Pennsylvania, 112 in Northeast and Eastern Ohio, 4 in Northern West Virginia, and 3 in Western Maryland. Each individual store carries between 22,000 and 60,000 items, approximately 5,000 of which are made by Giant Eagle, showing the success of this corporation.
Services offered
Giant Eagle offers over twenty-four different departments across its stores. The range of services include Iggle Video, a store for renting videos, DVDs, and video games, dry cleaning services, banks such as US Bank and Citizens Bank, an in-house day care, and pharmacies.
Recently, Giant Eagle has created the GetGo brand chain of self-service gas stations, some in conjunction with existing Giant Eagles, but most having their own convenience store. To compete with other local convenience store chains, Giant Eagle has instituted the Fuelperks program, where customers are rewarded by saving .10 per gallon they buy on a fill-up with every $50 they spend in Giant Eagle with their Advantage card. Most GetGo's are built from the ground-up, though Giant Eagle has bought several existing gas stations that were near Giant Eagle locations and have converted them into GetGo's. Some GetGo's also have a WetGo automatic car wash and a GetGo Kitchen, the latter of which is used to help GetGo compete better with their main rival in Pittsburgh and up-and-coming rival in Cleveland: the more established, fast growing chain Sheetz.
The chain started in the Pittsburgh area, and maintains both corporately owned and independently owned stores. The chain entered Cleveland in the 1980s, then aggressively expanded by acquiring the Stop N Shop stores in the area. Giant Eagle emerged as one of the dominant supermarket chains in Northeastern Ohio, competing mainly against the New York based Tops. Giant Eagle has the highest share of any supermarket chain in the Pittsburgh area, but has lost market share in recent years due to Wal-Mart's construction of Supercenters in the immediate Pittsburgh area. In contrast, in the Columbus market, Giant Eagle has struggled. As of November 2005, Giant Eagle held about 10% market share, compared to 15% each for Wal-Mart and Meijer, and 50% for Kroger.
The chain is using the slogan "Make every day taste better", after their previous slogan of "It takes a giant to make life simple".
Giant Eagle purchased independently-owned County Market stores, giving them a replacement store in Somerset, PA, a new store in Johnstown, PA, as well as their first Maryland stores, 1 in Cumberland, 1 in Hagerstown, and 2 in Frederick. The Cumberland store closed in December 2003, and the Hagerstown store closed in August 2005.
The chain has many workers unionized, under United Food & Commercial Workers Local 23 of Pittsburgh, UFCW Local 880 out of Cleveland, and UFCW Local 400 of Washington, DC, which represents workers in West Virginia stores. The Frederick, MD stores are not unionized, much like some independently owned stores throughout Pennsylvania.
The chain has built large prototypes, and has experimented with many departments unusual to supermarkets. Larger stores feature vast selections of ethnic and organic food, dry cleaning services, Iggle video, drive-thru pharmacies, in-store banking, Eagle's Nest for daycare purposes while shopping, as well as in-store coffee shops and prepared foods. Prepared foods are also sold at larger GetGo locations that can accommodate a GetGo Kitchen.
The chain, under pressure from Wal-Mart, has implemented a lower prices campaign throughout its stores, featured on products customers buy most. Giant Eagle has also reconfirmed its commitment to value by selling Topco-produced Valu Time products, which are substantially cheaper than other private-label and name-brand merchandise.