My understanding is Cub owns Supervalue and that they are going through financial difficulty, soNo, actually SuperValu Corp. owns CUB Foods, along with several other grocery chains. (See http://www.supervalu.com/home.html.) SuperValu is the 2nd largest public company in Minnesota. About 1/3 of the CUB stores are company stores (including all the Twin Cities ones), the other 2/3rds are locally owned franchises.
what's the WHOLE story here.
But SuperValu is generally slowing down on the retail stores to concentrate on the wholesale business. They've found that groceries is such a tight-margin business that it's hard to run a chain of stores centrally and have them turn a profit. It works much better when the stores are locally owned & managed, with SuperValu being the wholesale provider. So now they frequently sell stores to the local managers, loaning them the money to do the purchase, in exchange for contracts as the wholesale supplier.
As far as I know, SuperValu is not in any kind of financial trouble at all. In fact, grocery stores are one business that does fairly well in hard times, like the current Bush recession. People will cut back on spending in many areas, but they still have to have food!
They had a minor issue last year where they had to restate financial reports, but that was an employee fudging the figures to make her department look good, and hoping to make it up the next quarter. But there was no involvement from top management like in Enron, etc., and the amounts were actually fairly small in relation to the size of SuperValu.
Tim Bonham, Ward 12, Standish-Ericsson
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