Fred's is liquidating—and e-commerce is not to blame
If a regional discounter falls in the retail forest and nobody hears it, did it really happen?
The company–incongruously built by a man named Paul Baddour starting in the late 1940s–began 2019 with 570 stores but was down to barely over a 100 by the time it threw in the towel. It will liquidate what’s left over the next two months. What killed Fred’s was nothing but good old fashioned intra-channel retail competition. In what must have seemed like a good idea at the time, the company chose to play in two lanes where the competition was fierce–and particularly much larger scaled.
Fred’s other business was pharmacy, which on paper seemed like a good way to drive everyday traffic to its stores, much as grocery has worked for retailers like Walmart and Meijer's. But here, too, Fred’s was out of its league, going up against monster drug chains like Walgreens, CVS and Rite-Aid. The scale was just too small to be competitive.
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