Village Super Market Vice Chairman Bill Sumas told The Baltimore Sun recently that his stores, which are part of the Wakefern cooperative, operate on a one percent margin. At the same time, he credited his family’s involvement in the company as well as the economies of scale Wakefern offers as the reason they keep “moving in the right direction.”
Margins in the supermarket business are generally known to be in the one-and-a-half to two percent range, with stores like Whole Foods operating at close to a three percent margin.
The Sumas family has run supermarkets in New Jersey and Pennsylvania since 1937 and recently opened two ShopRite stores in Maryland. Both locations were Superfresh stores that closed earlier in the year. According to Sumas, his company wanted a third Superfresh site, but it went to Shoppers Food and Pharmacy.