dig out of rut

アメリカ小売業大手のWhole Foodsが苦戦しているようです。


What Whole Foods is doing to try to dig out of its rut

When Whole Foods Market frist began opening its groceries in cities and suburbs across the country, every store launch was something of a test case for whether orgaic eating was niche fad or part of a sweeping change in how many Americans want to eat.

For a while, Whole Foods consistently delivered impressive growth -- so impressive, in fact, that other massive retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kroger and Traget became eager to get in on what the industry now believes is a durable shift toward healthier less-processed food.

And that's when the going got tough for Whole Foods: The category it practically created was suddenly crowded with alternatives that often had lower price tags. On Wednesday, we saw some of the clearest evidence yet of how much Whole Foods has been hurt by this new reality. In its quarterly earnings report, the company said that sales were down 0.2 percent at stores open more than a year, the first time in at least four years it had seen a decline on this metric. Total revenue was up 6 percent, its smallest quarterly increase since at least 2011.
(Sarah Halzack. What Whole Foods is doing to try to dig out of its rut. The Washinton Post. November 5, 2015.)


アメリカに短期滞在した際、Whole Foodsを利用したことがありますが、健康志向を前面に打ち出した、こじゃれた感じの店舗だったという記憶があります。創業からしばらくは時流に乗って売り上げを伸ばしてきたのでしょうが、最近になって競合との差別化ができなくなり、売り上げに陰りがみられるということなのでしょう。

"dig out of its rut"というフレーズを初めて見たように思うのですが、"rut"とはわだち（轍）のことで、比喩的には“マンネリ”という意味です。

つまり、マンネリから脱却する、というのが"dig out of its rut"ということになりそうです。

手持ちの英和辞書にはこのフレーズは載っていませんでしたが、"dig out of rut"というのは結構お決まりのフレーズになっているようです。

ちなみに"dig out of rut"の逆、つまりマンネリにはまってしまう、というのは、


fall into rut


となります。