In the more rural / exurb parts of Portland metro they do really well. But they just have bizarre things. You can go load up on random bags of chips from a startup that's already out of business, that'll never get made again. And then one day they'll be the only market in the state that has raddichio. You have to be willing to go with it, but it's so cheap you can afford to just buy a bunch of stuff and make it work.
The couple of times I was in one (San Jose), it seemed like most of the stock was liquidated by other stores, and the extremely low frills store vibe was in full effect, so I suspect it's just a simple minimize the costs and hope. There was a pretty decent crowd, so they've got a market of IMHO price sensitive, quality insensitive customers.