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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.
Does anyone get hanged when it reaches half a billion?
Awesome. While we're at it let's sue Kroger/Smith's for the absolute eyesore that is the hideous playmobil-lookin 3D people in their ads. The design is so bad it's a public nuisance. Lol
That and their excessive use of Flo Rida'"Low" in their radio ads.
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’ve got three grocery stores near my house. One is owned by Kroger and two by Albertsons. I hate to think what would happen if there were zero effective competition.
Same situation but we have two Kroger-owned (FM and QFC) and one Albertsons-owned (Safeway). The Safeway is right across the street from Fred Meyer, so the chances are they will shut Safeway down if the merger goes through. No point in competing with themselves. So we're looking at fewer options, lost jobs, and higher prices. Wheee.
I wonder how much Walmart paid for that lawsuit.
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.
Prices are already outrageous. We don't need more of that.
Okay we'll stop the merger. I just need to tell them tomorrow while I'm there to get some tortillas for lunch. Albertsons, ...it's my store! 🎶 🎵
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.
Yep, that was the conclusion I came to as well.
Stop them building more stores at the very least.
There should be automatic break ups of companies that take up too much of the market share.
A hard limit would have an effect, but companies would intentionally just barely hover under the limit. Maybe if it was a chace based thing proportional to their market share. Might be worth looking into.
Block
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.
With the current extreme price gouging, seems like the perfect political cover to anti-trust the hell out of them and break them up.
You'd know the Libs would moan and get the Murdoch media to pump out the propaganda, but I think the Australian public would be on board. The tax cut reversal went over totally fine, because I guess on average people aren't as stupid as the Libs would like.
(For international readers, the Liberal Party are the leaders of the conservative coalition, confusingly.
In Canada we have multiple chains and they collude anyway
I feel the UK does it fairly well. Every supermarket has its place.
Waitrose for the middle class.
M&S for the people who think they're middle class.
Asda, Morrisons and Tesco for the masses.
Aldi and Lidl for the poor.
Heron Foods for the poor that can't cook.
Australia is super concentrated, the duopoly own 70% of the grocery store market as well as others like 60% of the alcohol market. The rest is made up of convenience stores (mostly one company, IGA) and Aldi, the latter having single digit percent.
You basically sell and buy groceries though these two or you don't exist. The CEO of one of them got so cocky during a recent interview he was forced to resign over it.
I guess we are pretty lucky over here in Germany then. We may have had some consolidation in the last few years, but there are still quite a few different grocery store companies competing.
The big ones are Aldi, Lidl, Rewe, Edeka, Netto, Penny and Norma. Quite a few of them own other supermarket chains as well, but those arent in my list.
Our supermarket market is so competitive that even companies like walmart failed to enter it (they also didnt do away with weird US customs, which probably didnt help).
Shittier services and higher prices/more fees, every merger ever.
Read yesterday about Wendy's rolling out new electronic menus this year so they can enact dynamic pricing. Can't wait until Surge pricing hits another non-negotiable like food.
Burn all these oligarchs down.
Yhgtbsm. Charge people more during a lunch rush because it’s convenient to do so. For fast food. Fuck them.
That’s stripping the “supply” out of “supply and demand” and just making it “demand pricing.”
They demand you pay more.
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
It's such a backwards way of doing it though. If they're going to invest that much, that means they need to make a lot of money to cover for it, so they'll have to keep prices where they are until they get the money, then they'll make a show of spending it to lower prices, which really means they're paying the salaries of business analysts who will come up with ideas. Once they've spent $500m coming up with ideas, their obligation will be fulfilled, and they won't have to actually act on any of those price-lowering ideas.
Instead they could just make $500m less in revenue by directly lowering prices immediately.
But then they can't brag about all the good money they spent and will instead whine about how hard up they are, so we'll be stuck with high prices and no relief.