Piggly Wiggly a candidate for resurgence in north Texas

Ask anyone who grew up in the South about Piggly Wiggly and they’ll have a story to tell. Their mothers and grandmothers called the grocery store “The Pig” for short.

The 107-year-old brand credited with the creation of the modern self-service supermarket could be making a Texas comeback. The name can still be seen on the side of some older buildings around Dallas-Fort Worth.

Piggly Wiggly is tiptoeing back into Texas thanks to one independent grocer and possibly a few more next year as a consequence of the pending Kroger acquisition of Albertsons, combining the two largest U.S. supermarket chains.

Sherman is getting a Piggly Wiggly in January, maybe as early as December depending on equipment arriving in time, said Fernando Soto, owner of the Save A Lot on Texoma Parkway that he’s about to rebrand.

Soto, an Irving resident who has been a food broker selling to grocers for 30 years, bought three small-town Texas grocery stores about a decade ago. He converted his Save A Lot stores in Paris and Athens to the Piggly Wiggly brand in March and May 2022.

East Texas has been turning out.

“Sales are up considerably — 30% to 35% — and our customer count also went up,” Soto said. A recent ad listed a loaf of Food Club sandwich bread for $1.89, Bush’s baked beans and Food Club canned soups were priced 5 for $5, avocados were 69 cents each and celery or a bag of carrots was 99 cents.

At its peak in 1932, the company operated 2,660 stores. It was later divided and sold off by region. It was franchised in the 1960s and had another heyday. C&S Wholesale Grocers, which is based in Keene, N.H., ended up with Piggly Wiggly when Fleming Cos. filed for bankruptcy in 2003. Fleming moved the headquarters of Piggly Wiggly out of Memphis for a short time to Lewisville where Fleming was based.

Today, there are more than 500 Piggly Wiggly stores in 18 states including 12 corporate stores owned by C&S, 156 franchised stores and 355 licensed stores, according to a company spokesman. C&S also owns 11 Grand Union stores in New York and Vermont.

Soto had no idea that the Paris store had been a Piggly Wiggly in the 1960s. “A customer brought in a picture and said she used to shop there with her mother,” Soto said.

The nostalgia that so many

have for the brand is priceless marketing for the name that inspires giggles. As the story goes, the founder Clarence Saunders opened his first store in Memphis in September 1916 and never replied to why he named his innovative store Piggly Wiggly. His response for keeping the reason a mystery: “So people will ask that very question,” he would say, according to the official company history.

Before Saunders opened his store with self-service aisles and shopping baskets, customers submitted their lists to clerks who filled the order, sort of the Instacart of old.

But how likely is it that smaller Piggly Wiggly stores without the bells and whistles of a new 100,000-plus-squarefoot H-E-B or a Kroger Marketplace would make sense in the competitive Dallas-Fort Worth market?

Soto’s Piggly Wiggly stores are each about 16,000 square feet — slightly bigger than the average Trader Joe’s or Aldi. Sprouts Farmers Market has a smaller concept of 23,000 square feet and it’s opened in Dallas.

Soto has licensing agreements with Piggly Wiggly for each of his three stores, but there are no geographic restrictions, he said. “C&S would be able to bring Piggly Wiggly to North Texas.”

One of the largest grocery suppliers in the U.S., C&S Wholesale Grocers is also Piggly Wiggly’s owner, and may soon own stores in Texas.

Kroger has a pending agreement with C&S to sell 413 stores including 26 in Texas as part of its efforts to get its huge $26.4 billion acquisition of Albertsons through the antitrust review of federal regulators.

Kroger hasn’t identified the 26 stores but did say they will all be from Albertsons which operates its namesake stores, Tom Thumb and Market Street locations in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Most of those stores are likely in North Texas neighborhoods where there’s overlap with Kroger stores.

The two chains have some overlap in Houston where Albertsons operates Randalls. Kroger doesn’t operate in Austin or San Antonio but is delivering groceries there from its new Dallas automated e-commerce facility.

In Texas, Kroger would gain new footprints in Austin where Randalls has stores, in El Paso where Albertsons operates stores and in West Texas where Lubbock-based United Supermarkets is owned by Albertsons.

Keene, N.H.-based C&S is already a big Texas grocery supplier, but operates no stores here.

C&S is the eighth largest private company in the U.S. on the annual Forbes list with an estimated revenue of $33 billion. Its executive chairman Rick Cohen is the third generation to run the business founded in 1918.

In Texas, C&S operates under the Grocers Supply brand which it acquired in 2014. That was the company’s entry into the Texas grocery market which is mostly dominated by the big supermarket chains that have their own extensive warehouse and distribution operations to feed their stores.

C&S supplies more than 900 independent grocery stores in Texas from individual stores to familiar Hispanic grocery chains.

It would be no problem for C&S to supply 30 more stores in Texas, but it isn’t saying yet how it might proceed to operate those stores. Local grocers said they couldn’t comment because they have signed non-disclosure agreements.

When C&S’s pending deal with Kroger was announced earlier this month, Kroger believed it had alleviated concerns about selling stores to weak buyers and elevated its prospects to clear the antitrust review.

The pending merger has been clouded by the aftermath of the Albertsons acquisition of Safeway in 2015 which left neighborhoods with fewer competing grocers when stores were closed.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has been opposing the Kroger and Albertsons tie-up, said it’s analyzing the proposed deal and the impact on its members and customers.

C&S, which supplies 7,500 grocery stores in the U.S., has a strategy to grow through its much smaller retail side.

Eric Winn, C&S chief operating officer and designated CEO, said this month the wholesaler sees the deal as an “opportunity for C&S to further expand into the retail market, which is an important component of our growth and future success.”

As part of the agreement, C&S will acquire QFC, Mariano’s and Carrs brand names. It also gets the exclusive licensing rights to the Albertsons brand name in Arizona, California, Colorado and Wyoming, but not in Texas.

C&S could introduce one of those new brands to Texas, but that’s an expensive proposition to muscle into such a highly competitive grocery market.

C&S could turn some of them into Piggly Wiggly stores or turn around and sell them to some of the retailers its supplies such as El Rio Grande in Dallas or Fiesta Mart in Houston.