Trader joe's organizational chart

You’re the VP of strategy for a grocery store startup (think: Jet.com or Peapod). Your chief analyst is out sick--lot of that going around recently. You need to get a report on the competitive landscape of brick-and-mortar grocery stores to your CEO ASAP. In less than 1 page, single-spaced okay, 12-point font, answer the following two questions:

1. Using the financial ratios below (2nd table), and Ghemawat and Rivkin’s (G&R) ideas on differentiation and cost based competition (use the G&R article for “Creating Competitive Advantage” article) please describe what the ratios tell you about the basic strategies of Whole Foods, Kroger, and Safeway. Where do you see evidence for cost or differentiation strategies? You’ll see that they differ and that they correspond to the real-world strategies of these firms. If you’ve never been to a Kroger or Safeway, just look at these pictures: Kroger & Safeway. All data that is relevant to this case is contained in the table.

2. Based on the Trader Joe’s material thus far (the first case from Week 1 and the podcast assigned for 3B), how you do you think Trader Joe’s fits into this competitive landscape? What do you think their strategies are with respect to SG&A and COGS? What basic strategies (again, from the Ghemawat & Rivkin article) do you think they are using? Describe why you think this by drawing on facts about Trader Joe’s and comparisons with other grocery companies. Note that Trader Joe’s Financial data is not available because they are a private company. Also, this data is available on page 12 of your Trader Joe’s case (those data are in 000’s).