Dear Mr. Kroger,
I’m a loyal customer, and I have a beef with you.
By the way, since you’re a grocery celebrity, may I just call you K-Rog? J-Lo, A-Rod – it’s all the rage these days. OK, K-Rog it is.
Anyway, I’m truly confused about something. Actually, I’m confused about many, many, things; but this particular area of perplexity has to do with…your company face.
I realize that it may be odd to talk about the external appearance of the 5th-largest retailer in the world, with over 2,600 stores – but, in front of every one of those stores is your company face. And by that, I mean your logo.
Your logo pains me. Every time I drive by it, I sigh in dismay. And this is from someone whose family shovels hundreds of dollars into your coffers every month!
I know we’re not supposed to call anybody else’s baby ugly, but…really? We need to have a talk about that logo.
You’ve been around for over 130 years, and the typography of that logo design dates back to pre-World War 2.
You don’t sell crackers from 1939, do you?
You don’t want your workers continuing to punch in for 80, 90, 100 years, do you? After a good productive run, it’s time for retirement. It’s time for fresh blood.
Logos are like that.
Your food is fresh and high-quality (that’s why we shop there!) but this distorted letter throwback is stale and out-of-date.
I see this logo, and I think of shag carpet. Formica tables. Flappers.
The Edsel.
Why are the “K” and the “g” doing that?? Typeface isn’t meant to be tortured that way. Nine out of 10 graphic designers have a seizure when they see it.
The tenth just had a stroke.
There are a few classics – just a few – that endure through many decades because they are so beautifully-designed, so meaningful, so memorable.
This is not one of those.
K-Rog, listen – with $93B in annual revenue, I know you can do way better. You don’t want to be a health hazard for those who have aesthetic sensibilities. (Helpful hint: please don’t follow the State of Tennessee, however, for the design of your new “visual identity system”).
Now, this is one element of my beef with your customer-facing image. But wait – there’s more!
We definitely need a clean-up on aisle 7, because, for some unfathomable reason, you also have a totally separate logo for your Kroger gas stations! And if this look has any relation to the parent logo, I for one, am unable to decipher it. Here is how the logo cacaphony looks down the road a piece from me:
Totally different typeface. Opposite-day backdrop (white, then black). Plus, a color-coded blob. Ummmm….help me out here, K-Rog.
What is that color-blob-thingie? I polled 879 random shoppers* to get their opinions on that symbolic mystery, and the answers ranged from melted-crayon spin art to a baseball diamond for Duplo-addicted toddlers. *(actually, I didn’t poll anybody. And, apparently, neither did the designer of that….thing.)
If there is some meaning or message in that ridiculous rhombus it is so well hidden that even Sherlock Holmes has given up and gone to Publix instead.
Tweet ThisSo, here’s the bottom line, K-Rog. It’s time. You’re good. We all know it. But your customers want to pull into your parking lot, look up at a nicely-designed Kroger sign, and say, “now, at last, we look a thousand times better than Food Lion!”
P.S. An astute friend of mine pointed out that the blob logo actually derives from Turkey Hill Minit Markets, which is one of many store brands owned by the Kroger company.
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My most beloved Chick-fil-A has a logo that’s worse than Kroger’s. In some ways, you just have to respect the bug/wordmark.
Arby’s updated their look but did it really work? McDonalds has been the same doe how long? Nike?
Perhaps Kroger just needs to change its stores to their Fred Meyer brand.
Chick-fil-A has succeeded phenomenally despite the meh logo. McD’s arches and the Nike swoosh are nearly timeless classics. But I’m not sure we’ll find people proudly walking around in their Kroger-themed shirts and hats, identifying themselves to all the world with that logo.
I wholeheartedly agree. Kroger logo is outdated and in need of a facelift.
My employer UPS went through a logo facelift recently and was very much needed to stay competitive and keep up with the times.
Kroger…..time to change.
Hi Steve,
So funny and so true. My kids often joke about everything Kroger in our house–we don’t buy name brands—but my wife and I always joke about the packaging, and logo 😉
The big store here is Fred Meyer (part of the Kroger empire) and man they need a revamp as well ;)… https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fred_Meyer_logo.svg
Huh. Are there ANY nice-looking grocery logos???
Also, I should note that when you pull in to the pumps to fill up with gas, there you see an entirely different type treatment – “kroger” all in small (uncapitalized) letters. Sigh.
I have tried to decipher the Kroger logo, and tried to remember clues to its origins my brain may have once held. At one point, way back in the 1950s or 1960s, wasn’t a lady pushing a shopping cart part of the Kroger logo? Did it morph into this abstraction of that image?
At this point, I think it’s the years logged by this logo that matter to the head people at Kroger, more than its merit judged alongside other major corporate logos. I don’t think this last figures in it at all. I think they are perfectly settled-in with the fact that people will always need groceries. No innovation anywhere on the horizon.
If some upstart hotshot company appeared that found a way to make selling and delivering all groceries from online orders work, and they started seriously eroding Kroger’s fortunes (the way, say, amazon did Border’s), then, then I think they’d want to look at a new logo. And under those circumstances, you can bet it would be war-room reaction, and they’d get it all wrong.
I always thought the negative space in the gas and pharmacy logo was an abstraction of the United States…it has a shape reminiscent of the 48 contiguous states.
The gas logo is a pattern of the 48-state US. It comes in very handy when traveling and wanting the best price on gas, while not necessarily knowing the local name of the Kroger-family store/quick stop. I may not know what Turkey Run is, but I know it is part of that chain’s gas stations.
The color-coded blob originates from the TomThumb gas station logo.
Now that i have looked at it a bit, the Turkey Hill logo looks like a severely distorted outline of the continental United States…
The logotypes of most of Kroger’s subsidiaries are even worse. I’m looking at you King Soopers.