Five Wyoming Albertsons stores set to be sold if merger goes through
CHEYENNE — If Kroger’s $24.6 billion acquisition of Albertsons goes through, the companies agreed to sell 579 stores to C& S Wholesale Grocers as part of a divestiture plan in an attempt to ensure market fairness.
On Tuesday, Albertsons released a list of all possible locations slated to be sold as part of the deal, including five in Wyoming.
Of those, only the Albertsons on Pershing Boulevard would be sold in Cheyenne if the merger is successful.
Outside of the capital city, Albertsons locations in Casper, Gillette, Jackson and Rock Springs would all be sold, as well.
To the south, four Safeway locations in Fort Collins, Colorado, and 12 in Denver also would be divested.
The divestiture package is in response to concerns raised by federal and state antitrust regulators that the merger would eliminate competition and raise grocery prices for millions of Americans and harm tens of thousands of workers.
If the deal goes through, Kroger and Albertsons would operate more than 5,000 stores and approximately 4,000 retail pharmacies and would employ nearly 700,000 employees across 48 states, according to a release from the Federal Trade Commission.
Kroger is the second-largest grocer in the United States, and Albertsons the fourth in terms of revenue, as of November 2023. If the merger goes through, Kroger will remain second-largest, only behind Walmart, which operates 4,609 retail units in the country and employs approximately 1.6 million employees, about three times the population of Wyoming.
As part of the divestiture deal, C& S would license the Albertsons banner in Wyoming and the Safeway banner in Colorado. According to the list, the Albertsons on Yellowstone Road and the King Soopers on Dell Range Boulevard would remain under Albertsons/ Kroger ownership.
However, the merger is not yet a done deal. The proposal is being challenged in federal court by the FTC and a coalition of eight states and the District of Columbia, including Wyoming.
The Albertsons located at 3355 E. Pershing Blvd. in Cheyenne is one of the five Wyoming
In February, the FTC announced it is suing to block the merger, which is the largest proposed supermarket merger in U.S. history, alleging that the deal is anticompetitive.
The agency charged that the deal would eliminate competition between Kroger and Albertsons, leading to higher prices for groceries and other essential household items for millions of Americans.
“Essential grocery store workers would also suffer under this deal, facing the threat of their wages dwindling, benefits diminishing and their working conditions deteriorating,” said Henry Liu, director of the FTC’ Bureau of Competition in a statement in February.
On the state level, it is also being challenged by the attorneys general of Colorado and Washington. Those hearings will begin in August and September, respectively, and a hearing on a preliminary injunction in FTC v. Kroger will be held on Aug. 26.
The merger agreement has an outside date (when the deal is finalized) set for Oct. 9.
The United Food & Commercial Workers union, which has been opposed to the merger since it was announced in 2022, said in a statement that no Safeway stores are on the list that are in UFCW Local 400 states.
Kroger maintains that blocking the merger would harm the people that the FTC is trying to protect.
“The FTC’s decision makes it more likely that America’s consumers will see higher food prices and fewer grocery stores at a time when communities across the country are already facing high inflation and food deserts,” Kroger said in a statement in February. “In fact, this decision only strengthens larger, non-unionized retailers like Walmart, Costco and Amazon by allowing them to further increase their overwhelming and growing dominance of the grocery industry.”
Kroger also noted that there would be no store closures as a result of the merger.
This story was published on July 11, 2024.