[Zarley]

This article hits the nail on the head. Shopping at a Safeway in the U.S. is a far superior experience compared to the bastardized Sobeys version we have in Canada now. My club card number still works down there as well.

How Sobeys screwed up Safeway in a messy takeover that left empty shelves, massive losses, and drove customers away

...“Empire keeps blaming price competition and oil woes for the disastrous losses of Safeway in Western Canada, but the reality is the Safeway stores are poorly managed by Sobeys,” said one consumer who spoke with the Financial Post and sent recent photos of empty shelves taken at an Edmonton Safeway store.

“Sobeys’ system is to only stock product three deep, whereas Safeway had much deeper inventory and would pay staff to keep shelves replenished. Long-time Safeway shoppers like me have been forced to move to Save-On or Superstore. We didn’t want to leave, but did so because of all the changes made to Safeway.”...

...But it didn’t take long for the first consumer grumblings to begin after the Safeway deal closed in November 2013. By April, Sobeys had eliminated a Safeway loyalty program that many customers liked as part of its efforts to integrate the two companies systems — a task that included everything from sourcing and technology to employee and customer relations management.

Consumers also began to complain about out-of-stock goods, especially when Sobeys switched Safeway’s produce supply, which had been controlled by its U.S. parent.

Meanwhile, bringing in Sobeys’ SAP back-office software led to technical hurdles and frustrated employees. Employee sentiment further declined after Sobeys centralized its Western Canadian head office functions to a building in Calgary from regional offices in Victoria, Edmonton and Winnipeg, and the issues continued to plague the business throughout 2015.

“There has been disruption across the whole way we operate, associated with the adoptions of new procedure (and) processes, and it had an impact on the operation as a whole which means that obviously service levels were also impacted,” Poulin said during the retailer’s second-quarter conference call last December.

“People have been distracted from customer-facing activities towards more internal-facing activities as they adopted new processes, and we’re not going to say everything went smooth on everything.”

Sobeys also assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that Western Canadians were indifferent to Safeway’s in-store brands, or at least neutral enough not to mind a phased-in switch to Sobeys’ house brand, Compliments, a situation that was exacerbated by corresponding out-of-stock packaged goods throughout the change.

“The customer base at Safeway was very loyal to the stores,” Charlebois said. “And Sobeys got rid of a lot of the things that those consumers really cared about.”...

National Post