Last week, Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola joined 27 other D.C. lawmakers from 16 states in a legal brief backing a lawsuit by federal regulators to block a massive, national grocery store merger.
Most Alaskans live in a community where a Fred Meyer store competes directly with a Carrs or a Safeway, so the proposal for one parent company to buy the other for $24.6 billion has a lot of Alaska consumers worried.
Here’s what we know about where the proposal is now, after it was first announced in October of 2022.
What’s at stake?
If you take what the companies are saying in good faith, not much. They’ve made sweeping promises about the good things that will happen and the bad things that won’t if Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, is allowed to buy Albertsons, which owns Safeway and Carrs. The companies say investors, customers, workers and communities are all supposed to benefit.
“We are confident our transaction with the proposed divestitures will mean lower prices and more choices for customers,” Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen said in a video about the proposed merger. “It will mean more opportunities for retail associates to grow their career while we secure the future of good paying union jobs.”
Here are some of the specific promises Kroger and Albertsons have made:
- No store closures
- No pharmacy closures
- No front-line job losses with protection for worker pay and benefits
- A $500 million investment in reducing prices
- A $1 billion investment in employee benefits
- A $1.3 billion investment to improve Albertsons stores
Kroger points to its 20-year track record that includes lowering its profit margins to keep prices down amid past acquisitions.
How can all of these promises be possible?
The idea is if Kroger and Albertsons merge, they’ll be in better shape to compete with even bigger retailers, like Costco and Walmart, as well as growing competitors, like dollar stores that now sell groceries and even Amazon. Bigger scale means bigger efficiencies, and that’s where the upside is supposed to come from.
Of course, most Alaskans live in communities where Fred Meyer competes with Carrs or Safeway. Specifically, that’s Anchorage, Eagle River, Palmer, Wasilla, Fairbanks, Juneau and Soldotna.
Federal regulators are wary of mergers because they can be anticompetitive, concentrating too much market power and hurting regular shoppers. To try to win regulators’ approval, Kroger and Albertsons say they’re prepared to sell off all 15 of the Carrs and Safeway stores in those Alaska communities, plus three more in Girdwood, Kenai and North Pole, to a company called C&S Wholesale Grocers based in New Hampshire.
The Safeways in Seward, Valdez, Kodiak, Ketchikan, Nome and Unalaska are not on the divestment list and would remain with the merged company.
Nationally, Kroger and Albertsons plan to sell a total of 579 stores, plus six distribution centers and a dairy plant, to C&S.
Again, McMullen says these divested stores won’t close, because C&S is committed to running them as they are today.
Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankoran says C&S will make the landscape more competitive.
“Their deep industry knowledge and experience gives us great confidence in their ability to become even fiercer competitors moving forward,” Sankoran said in the video.
C&S CEO Eric Winn also says his company is playing the long game.
“We are confident this expanded divestiture package will provide the stores, supporting assets and expert operators needed to ensure these stores continue to successfully serve their communities for many generations to come,” Winn said in an April press release.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555, which represents 30,000 grocery store workers in Oregon, Idaho and Washington, came out in support of the merger in February. However, the parent union, which represents 1.2 million workers, voted last year to oppose the merger. Other UFCW locals, including Alaska’s, also oppose the merger.
So what’s the problem? Why do people oppose the merge?
Basically, opponents just don’t believe the companies, and there isn’t anything in place to hold them to their promises.
In Alaska, the opponents include Democratic Congresswoman Mary Peltola, 24 state lawmakers, the grocery store workers’ union and lots of regular Alaskans.
“It’s a huge issue for Alaskans that resonates. It’s not a political issue, it’s a pocketbook issue,” said Veri di Suvero, executive director of the Alaska Public Interest Research Group, a statewide consumer advocacy nonprofit that also opposes the merger. “Whether or not it’s in good faith, about these spinoffs, we’ve seen over and over again that they don’t work.”
Di Suvero points back to 1999, when Safeway bought out Carrs. AKPIRG and Alaska’s attorney general got involved, and they worked out a deal to sell off seven stores to let the merger go through.
Six of those stores became Alaska Marketplace grocery stores. They all closed within about a year.
The seventh, at the University Center mall in Midtown Anchorage, survived and became a different grocery store, Natural Pantry, which eventually outgrew the space and built its current, standalone location off 36th Avenue.
Fast forward to 2015, and Safeway got swallowed up by Albertsons. Federal regulators approved that deal after the companies agreed to divest 168 stores. 146 went to a small Washington grocery retailer called Haggen.
Haggen wasn’t successful, either. Within a year, Haggen sued Albertsons and accused it of sabotaging stores it bought. It got sued back by Albertsons and filed for bankruptcy. In the ensuing firesale, Albertsons ended up buying back many of its divested stores, and ultimately what remained of Haggen itself.
Di Suvero is also concerned about how unique Alaska’s supply chain is, particularly its heavy dependence on a single port. Di Suvero and other opponents question if C&S has the expertise and wherewithal to step in and run its new grocery stores successfully.
So critics think C&S is setting itself up for failure, like Haggen?
Yes.
C&S isn’t a national player in the world of retail groceries. It owns the Piggly Wiggly brand and runs some Piggly Wiggly stores directly, but most are independently owned and operated under a franchise license. It also runs 11 Grand Union markets.
But C&S is a big deal nationally in grocery wholesaling, supplying more than 7,500 supermarkets. Forbes says it’s an industry leader in supply chain innovation, the largest wholesale grocery supply company in the country and the eighth biggest privately held company in the country. So C&S is in a totally different league from Haggen.
That said, the Federal Trade Commission says C&S doesn’t have its own store brand product lines, loyalty programs or e-commerce platforms it needs to successfully compete.
Does Alaska figure prominently into the overall merger?
No.
Kroger and Albertsons combined have 36 stores in the state. That’s 11 Fred Meyers, and 24 Carrs or Safeways plus Crow Creek Mercantile in Girdwood. Across the country, they have about 5,000.
And unlike in the Safeway-Carrs merger in 1999, the governor’s office has been hands off. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has not weighed in. The state Department of Law, which has its own consumer protection unit, says it’s monitoring the merger and the Federal Trade Commission’s legal fight to stop it.
Outside of Alaska, eight states and the District of Columbia have joined the FTC’s lawsuit in federal court in Oregon.
And the attorneys general of Colorado and Washington have their own similar lawsuits.
What happens if the merger gets shot down?
There’s a lot invested in this merger. A reporter with WCPO in Cincinnati, where Kroger is headquartered, dug through financial filings and found that through March, the two parent companies had already spent $864 million in merger-related expenses.
WCPO also found that Kroger had agreed to pay Albertsons $600 million if the merger fails.
So that’s a big incentive for Kroger to appeal if these legal fights don’t go its way.
So what’s next?
The legal stuff.
Hearings in the FTC case at the U.S. District Court of Oregon begin Aug. 26. This case is important, but won’t necessarily make or break the merger. The judge there is supposed to rule on whether or not to pause the merger, while more substantive arguments go before an administrative law judge in Washington, D.C.
The trial in the Washington state court is scheduled to begin Sept. 16, and, separately, a Colorado state judge last month imposed his own order to pause the merger, pending a legal challenge there. That trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 30.