A supermarket is a self-serviceshop offering a wide variety of food, beverages and household products, organized into sections. This kind of store is larger and has a wider selection than earlier grocery stores, but is smaller and more limited in the range of merchandise than a hypermarket or big-box market. In everyday United States usage, however, "grocery store" is often used to mean "supermarket".
The supermarket typically has places for fresh meat, fresh produce, dairy, deli items, baked goods, and similar foodstuffs.
Shelf space is also reserved for canned and packaged goods and for various non-food items such as kitchenware, household cleaners, pharmacy products and pet supplies. Some supermarkets also sell other household products that are consumed regularly, such as alcohol (where permitted), medicine, and clothing, and some sell a much wider range of non-food products: DVDs, sporting equipment, board games, and seasonal items (e.g., Christmaswrapping paper, Easter eggs, school uniforms, Valentine's Day themed gifts, Mother's Day gifts, Father's Day gifts and Halloween).
A larger full-service supermarket combined with a department store is sometimes known as a hypermarket. Other services may include those of banks, cafés, childcare centers/creches, insurance (and other financial services), mobile phone sales, photo processing, video rentals, pharmacies, and gas stations. If the eatery in a supermarket is substantial enough, the facility may be called a "grocerant", a portmanteau of "grocery" and "restaurant".
The traditional supermarket occupies a large amount of floor space, usually on a single level. It is usually situated near a residential area in order to be convenient to consumers. The basic appeal is the availability of a broad selection of goods under a single roof, at relatively low prices. Other advantages include ease of parking and frequently the convenience of shopping hours that extend into the evening or even 24 hours of the day. Supermarkets usually allocate large budgets to advertising, typically through newspapers and television. They also present elaborate in-shop displays of products. (Full article...)
The overall size of the sector has been increasing since the end of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, with retail sales increasing by 30% between 1999 and 2005. One contributing factor was the growth of larger stores with greater buying power and economies of scale, at the cost of smaller bricks and mortar merchants. Another contributing factor was low price inflation, with the price of imported goods falling 12% during that period. (Full article...)
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Pak'nSave (stylised as PAK'nSAVE) is a New Zealand discount food supermarket warehouse chain owned by the Foodstuffs cooperative. It is one of the three main supermarket chains in New Zealand, alongside Woolworths New Zealand and New World (the latter is also owned by Foodstuffs). There is a total of 58 Pak'nSave stores throughout the country.
Pak'nSave stores are large and have a no frills environment, often with unlined interiors and concrete floors. From 2015, Pak'nSave was consistently the cheapest supermarket in New Zealand during several years of surveys. (Full article...)
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KMD Brands, formerly Kathmandu Holdings, is a global outdoor, lifestyle and sports company consisting of three brands: Kathmandu, Rip Curl and Oboz. Kathmandu was founded in 1987 in New Zealand and specialises in clothing and equipment for travel and the outdoors. Oboz, part of the group since 2018, is based in North America and designs wilderness footwear. Rip Curl, acquired in 2019, is a global surf brand founded in Bells Beach, Australia in 1969. (Full article...)
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Briscoe Group is a New Zealandretail chain. It has 92 stores throughout New Zealand trading under the Briscoes Homeware (48) and Rebel Sport (44) nameplates. The company was founded in 1861 in Dunedin, New Zealand, providing wares to gold miners. Profit in 2022 was $88.4 million. It has 2,300 staff in 90 stores. (Full article...)
The stores are operated under franchise agreements with Wholesale Distributors Ltd (WDL), a division of Woolworths New Zealand, one of New Zealand's largest retail and distribution companies. (Full article...)
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Foodland is an Australian supermarket chain in South Australia, founded in 1962 and has been operating for over 60 years.
Foodland has established itself as an well-known brand in the South Australian retail sector and directly employs over 7,000 staff and indirectly more than 1,500 South Australian staff. There were 96 stores covering South Australia and Broken Hill in 2023. (Full article...)
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Netto Marken-Discount (also known as just Netto, formerly Plus) is a German discount supermarket chain owned by the German supermarket cooperative Edeka Group, and operates mostly in the south and west of Germany. The company reached its 1000th store in 2004, then aggressively expanded to the 4000th store in 2009, making it the largest discounter in Germany. (Full article...)
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The Trusts are a group of two community-owned organisations (licensing trusts) with a near monopoly on the sale of alcohol in West Auckland. They are one of the largest alcohol retailers in New Zealand.
FoodWorks is an Australian supermarket chain run by independent retail group Australian United Retailers (AUR). AUR was created in November 2004 from the merger of the FoodWorks Supermarket Group and Australian United Retailers (AUR). It is Australia's second largest leading independent supermarket retailing group, supporting in excess of A$1.35 billion in annual sales at the retail level. Its main competitors are Woolworths, Coles, IGA and Aldi.
Retail groups that were part of the merger included AUR, Foodstore, FoodWorks, Buy Rite, Cut Price, 727, Rite-Way, Banana Joe's, Food-Rite, Tuckerbag and Food-Way. (Full article...)
Oporto has more than 100 eat-in or take-away restaurants in Australia and New Zealand. It previously also operated stores throughout China and expanded to Sri Lanka and Vietnam in August 2018. Oporto is also looking to expand its operations into the Middle East; its Dubai store opened in early 2020. (Full article...)
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SPAR, originally "DESPAR", styled as "DE SPAR" (Dutch pronunciation:[dəˈspɑr]), is a Dutch multinational franchise that provides branding, supplies and support services for independently owned and operated food retail stores. It was founded in the Netherlands in 1932, by Adriaan van Well, and consists of 13,996 stores in 48 countries. Its headquarters are in Amsterdam. The company operates a partnership programme and has a presence in most European countries, as well as many others throughout Asia, Africa and Oceania. (Full article...)
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Z Energy is a New Zealand fuel distributor with branded service stations. It owns some of the former assets of Shell New Zealand and Chevron New Zealand. It has been a subsidiary of Australian petroleum company Ampol since May 2022.
Shell left the New Zealand fuel distribution business in April 2010, selling its operations to Infratil and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, with the operations being rebranded as Z Energy in 2011. Z Energy acquired Chevron's New Zealand subsidiary Caltex in June 2016. (Full article...)
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DEKA was a nationwide chain of general merchandise stores in New Zealand. It was launched in 1988 by L.D. Nathan, which split its supermarket and general merchandise divisions. In 1992 ownership of DEKA shifted to the Farmers Trading Company, which had until then been a competitor. As a result of unsustainable financial losses, all DEKA stores were either closed or converted to Farmers stores in 2001. (Full article...)
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Maxima Grupė UAB is a Lithuanian group of retail chain companies operating in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria. It is the largest Lithuanian capital company and the largest employer in the Baltic states. , Maxima has 1599 stores in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria. Each store offers between 3,000 and 65,000 brands, depending on the size of the store. The group employs around 40,000 people. Its main headquarters are in Vilnius, Lithuania. (Full article...)
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Accent Group is an Australian and New Zealand footwear and clothing retail, wholesaling and distribution company. It has more than 800 retail stores, along with 19 brands, and more than 20 online platforms.
Veropoulos (Greek: Βερόπουλος) was a large retail group based in Greece until 2016. It held the SPAR retail franchise for Greece, with the franchise still present in the country after Spar's cooperation agreement with the Asteras Group. As a result of bankruptcy, Veropoulos was bought in 2016 by the Metro Group, which re-branded the stores soon after as My Market stores. In Crete, Veropoulos operated stores under the name of Chalkiadakis. Outside Greece, Veropoulos operated supermarkets in the North Macedonia as Vero, and in Serbia as SuperVero. The company was established in 1973, when the first Veropoulos supermarket opened in Athens. As of 2012, the company owned 185 stores in Greece, 10 stores in the North Macedonia and six hypermarkets in Serbia. In Greece, Veropoulos was the fourth-biggest supermarket chain in terms of market share. The firm belonged to the Veropoulos family who are also the founders of the company. (Full article...)
One of the oldest surviving retail businesses in New Zealand, it was established in 1880 by Ulster-born Marianne Smith as a drapers and millinery shop, and is the oldest-surviving department store in Auckland. Currently, it is mostly fashion-oriented, with sections for jewellery, make-up and homewares. (Full article...)
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Spark New Zealand Limited is a New Zealand telecommunications and digital services company providing fixed-line telephone services, mobile phone services, broadband, and digital technology services (including cloud, security, digital transformation, and managed services). Its customers range from consumers to small - medium business, government agencies and large enterprise clients. It was formerly known as Telecom New Zealand until it was rebranded to Spark on 8 August 2014. It has operated as a publicly traded company since 1990. Spark's mobile network reaches 98% of New Zealand, with over 2.5 million mobile connections and 704,000 broadband connections
Spark is one of the largest companies by value on the New Zealand Exchange (NZX). As of 2007, it was the 39th largest telecommunications company in the OECD. (Full article...)
In France, the chain was bought in 2005 by the Ed brand of the Carrefour group. In 2010, it operated approximately 3,000 stores across 6 countries in Europe. In May 2014, Penny is present in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Czech Republic, Romania and soon in Turkey. After taking over 7 stores in Liguria from Tuodì in October 2017 for €9.2 million, it is present in Italy with 357 points of sale distributed in 17 regions, served by 7 distribution centers. (Full article...)
... that before Angeli Foods was sold this year, the first self-service grocery store in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan had been owned by three generations of a single family?
Four people are killed and ten others are wounded in a shooting at the Mad Butcher supermarket in Fordyce, Arkansas, United States. The suspect, Travis Eugene Posey, is shot and arrested by Arkansas State Police. (AP)
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