Very rare pro-consumer W

Two of the major chains in my area merged a while back and they were required to close down a few of their stores to prevent having a monopoly.

So of course they closed the stores that were under-performing, which just means they closed the ones in poor neighborhoods.

They still owned or kept the leases to the buildings and sub-leased them out with the stipulation that any business taking them over could not carry groceries.

Not only are the people in those areas having to drive a lot further (or spend more time on public transit), but a lot the surrounding businesses to the stores that closed down ended up going out of business themselves.

There's at least one nearly abandoned mini-small, shopping plaza in town due to this.

As an Australian who has to deal with the duopoly of our grocery stores after we let them all merge years ago, it absolutely will drive higher prices and nobody who isn't a shareholder should want this.

They basically "collude" to fix and raise prices here and have whole teams of people who's job it is to monitor and extract as much money out of us as possible. They also force growers to accept shitty deals or they reject their produce due to "not meeting their quality standards" and there's basically nowhere else for them to sell it in the quantities they need to.

Nobody wins in grocery store mergers except the shareholders.

Albertsons has been buying up competitors for a while.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertsons

Kroger has a few too:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger#Chains

They turned Pavilions from a nice store to another dingy grocery. I can’t imagine this going through would be good for consumers. Many neighborhoods only have access to 2 stores at best, and I suspect most are already owned by the same parent. A merger would further turn this into a monopoly.

Bold of them to believe they'll stop price gouging regardless.

My main takeaway from this article is that Walmart controls nearly twice the market share of Kroger and Albertsons combined - and needs to be broken up.

Hmmm….
Kroger: 2,750 stores in 35 states and the District of Columbia
Albertsons: 2,273 stores in 34 states
Total: 5,023 stores. Presumably some would close due to proximity after the merger.

Walmart: 5,214 stores in the 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico

I smell a break up!!!

Shittier services and higher prices/more fees, every merger ever.

Didn't Albertson's already merge with Safeway?

Capitalism, where a couple of fucking dudes can make or break a whole country.

Kroger has promised to invest $500 million to lower prices as soon as the deal closes.

Kroger made 1.8 billion last year after expenses, so investing 500 million is a good gesture of faith but, I think that it should be required to be repeated yearly if they wish to make it as a condition of the merger, 500 million while likely wouldn't do much prices wise, wouldn't even be helpful if they aren't doing it past the first year anyway

Surely this merger is different from all the other ones where corporations lied their asses off then jacked up prices after the merger went through, right?

I hope the lawsuit is successful. This would make them the only viable store in many areas.

What will the new celebrity name be?

Krogertsons?

Albertger?

It's interesting living in a partof the USA where I couldn't even tell you where a Kroger or Albertsons is. Maybe they don't tend to overlap with Food Lion's?

Hope this goes better than when they tried to stop MS from buying up Activision Blizzard.

Prices are already outrageous. We don't need more of that.

Having a non-nationalized monopoly is stupid and bad.

But being champions of free market economics, and then being shocked pikachu when the free market does free market things is even stupider. Especially when nothing is done to reign in this free market crap.

The US wants to be socialist so bad, but can't get their populous to vote for it because of scary words they don't understand. Instead it's done as a random patchwork that of course doesn't work and corporate lobbying just makes it appear as an illusion of choice.

Next time you're out shopping in Walmart or Kroger or whatever look at the aisle you're in and the choices. Let's say cereal. 200 different choices of flavour. 50 different "brands". In reality it's all 1 company. There may be a couple outliers but it's all the same company selling the same sugary processed crap giving you the illusion of choice.

Kroger and Albertsons are the two major chains in my city (known as Fry's and Safeway here). If they merge, their only real competition left is Walmart.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't secretly merged decades ago already. Their products, prices, and branding are nearly identical. Even the commercials they play over the store speakers are the same.