Price Chopper (the NY/PA chain, not the KS/MO one) and Tops Markets announced today that the two companies will be merging. The resulting company will consist of almost 300 stores, although the grocery stores making up the combined company are still planning on maintaining their existing brands – Price Chopper, Market 32, Market Bistro and Tops. I guess that’s a better option than renaming the joint company as ‘Top Price Market’.
It’ll be interesting to see whether they remain relatively distinct, or if their weekly offers become aligned, much in the same way that Kroger and its affiliate stores run the same kind of deals each week. From a gift card perspective, it’s hard to know which would be the better option as they seem to run gift card deals in very different ways.
Price Chopper tends to offer somewhat frequent deals giving 5x-8x points which are worth 5%-8% back on groceries. Tops on the other hand seems to rarely run gift card deals outside of the two months leading up to Christmas where they give $10 off when buying $50 gift cards for many different brands (that is, unless they run deals I’m not aware of due to them not being listed in their ad each week).
The gift card deals at Tops are better than at Price Chopper in terms of how rewarding they are, but it seems like they don’t run any gift card deals for ~10 months of the year. Price Chopper deals on the other hand aren’t as generous, but they’re far more common.
It would therefore be nice if it became the best of both worlds where they offer Tops-style deals on gift cards but with the frequency of Price Chopper deals. It’s doubtful that’ll happen, but you never know.
You can read the full announcement here.