Marshall is a brilliant financial strategist. When it comes to working with Wall Street, he is a star in the food industry. Marshall closely cultivated relationships with analysts and institutional investors.

Kroger is making a superb strategic decision to move to the Everyday Living category because the brand has much more cachet. The path to higher consumer satisfaction and profitability is through a bigger and better portfolio of private brands.

There is a high hurdle for Macy's to clear.

Cerberus has been in the lead in other supermarket sector bidding and has sometimes faded fast in the home stretch.

I think Goldman Sachs, which was one of the strategic advisers, thought it was easier selling the whole company on a bundled basis.

Johnston came in with a lot of problems that were passed along by the prior regime that would take four to five years to dig out from.