NEW YORK — While Safeway will continue to offer
promotional pricing, “over the next two years we
will be less promotional and provide better
everyday value, which is what our cost reduction
and process improvement programs are designed to
accomplish,” Steve Burd, chairman, president and
chief executive officer of the Pleasanton,
Calif.-based chain, said yesterday at the Bank
of America Consumer Conference here. “Promotions
do bring in traffic, but we think, longer-term,
we want to be less promotional and have a better
everyday value, which has been our stated
objective since we launched the lifestyle
strategy in 2003, so you will see us
increasingly invest in everyday price.” In
response to a question, Burd said each of
Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets that
opens within 1.5 miles of a Safeway location has
just 10% of the impact of a conventional store
opening. “So if they built 200 stores, it would
have the impact of 20 conventional stores coming
into our market — and we had 23 [competitive
openings] in Phoenix during the first quarter
alone.”
