Grocery Chains and Bush's Ownership Society (stores closing)

http://www.counterpunch.com/sandronsky06102006.html


Profits Fall, Stores Close
Grocery Chains and Bush's Ownership Society


There are too many U.S. grocery chain stores, said George Whalin, head of Retail Management Consultants, in The Sacramento Bee of June 7. Call it overcapacity in the grocery industry.

A few new owners of the Albertsons grocery chain are responding accordingly. In early June, three companies purchased Albertsons Inc. for the tidy sum of $17 billion.

One of the trio, Cerberus Partners, an investment firm based in New York, partnered with the commercial real estate firm of Kimco Realty Corp. To halt a fall in profits for Albertsons during the past four years, 100 of its stores nationwide will be closing, 37 of which are located in Northern California.

These "under-performing stores" did not bring an acceptable return on investment to owners, according to Albertsons spokeswoman Quyen Ha. And the consequences for Albertsons employees?

How many of them will become jobless is not yet known. Contrast their bitter fate with that of Larry Johnston, CEO of Albertsons.

Mr. Johnston earned about $60 million as Albertsons shareholders lost around $900 million between 2000 and 2003, said Graef Crystal, a business professor at UC Berkeley, in a report on KTVB NewsChannel 7, the NBC station in Boise, Idaho on July 8, 2003. Nice work if you can get it.
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more and more newly poor

the bushmilhousegang really, really hates Californians

but on Wash. Journal - cspan - this morning Carl Cameron of Fox news told us that unemployment was so low that nearly everybody in the US had a job. but then, Carl is a paid mediawhore.

I see it where I live. It's only a matter of time. Most of the Department stores now carry the same goods from China/India. In checking my area it seems that the "traditional dept. stores" are going the Walmart or Target way with same clothing under different labels but made in the same places and of the same quality.

This year everything is India ...cheap madras/cheap peasant clothes made with dyes that give the clothes an "odor" that doesn't wash out.

Grocery stores don't seem to offer anything different with the one exception that "organic lines" seem to be sold more in the higher end stores. You can only have so much variety for competition when Agri-business produces the same cloned meat, vegetables and fruits.

The Mega Corporation is the model these days. Easier for shipping and overhead costs.

Wal-Mart's Scott Offers Organics, Premium Wines at Annual Meeting

JUNE 06, 2005 -- FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- Food is an important ingredient in Wal-Mart's recipe for success moving forward, according to president and c.e.o. F. Lee Scott--but that future might be tasting decidedly more upscale.

Scott joked during the company's annual meeting here last Friday that his career "was going nowhere until Frosted Flakes" became a Wal-Mart staple. The c.e.o.'s mention of the popular Kellogg's breakfast cereal is indicative of the company's success with core food products, something that is unlikely to change. However, with its archrival, Target, continuing to find success with a more stylish outlook on discounting, Wal-Mart now sees opportunities for companywide growth via foodstuffs such as organics and premium wines.

Scott proclaimed he is "excited about organic food, the fastest growing category in all of food, and at Wal-Mart." He said people in all income brackets want organic food products for their family, and lower-income families should not be denied such goods due to high prices.

Scott and Sam's Club president and c.e.o. Kevin Turner each noted the opportunities their chains have in food as a vehicle of growth. Both executives mentioned Sam's Club Key Lime Pie, a new item that signifies the widening breadth of Wal-Mart's product offerings as the mega-retailer attempts to appeal to a broader consumer base.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/organic/walmart.cfm

Bush Sr. loved to talk about the New World Order. He never mentioned that it would be run by Wal-Mart.

beyond my understanding. Just why is C-Span giving FOX more airtime?

Grocery stores are at the top of my list of getting on my nerves and emptying my wallet. We have only two major chains in this area - one foreign owned by Royal Dutch Ahold. The other is Giant Eagle from Pittsburgh. GE has now closed the second of two stores that were closest to my home. They built a new store which I checked out for the first time last week. The new store has a pharmacy, a bank, a drycleaner, a florist, a deli with seating, a photo lab, a drugstore, a card shop and a promised gas station. I don't need all that.

This store was built on the Pete Boris landfill, a garbage dump. It is in full sun with no trees with high winds. The cost to cool and heat the huge new store will be enormous.

I just want my old store back that served me well by stocking groceries that I needed. Prices keep going up but my income does not.

Bigger and bigger profits and stores is not better.

Statements like this make me very angry:

'These "under-performing stores" did not bring an acceptable return on investment to owners, according to Albertsons spokeswoman Quyen Ha. '

I would bet those stores were performing a valuable service for their customers and employees just as mine were in my Ohio suburb.

I live in the East Bay, and two Albertson's markets near me are closing. Note that these two stores were Lucky stores when I moved here, and they were kinda funky when they were part of Lucky. But Albertson's has not spent dime one on either of these locations, and they are even more unpleasant to shop in now. They opened a Big Large McHuge Albertson's/Sav-On on one of the main shopping drags, so it's obvious where they want to steer the business. Unfortunately the locations they are closing are convenient to people who live in the nearby apartment complexes and don't always have a car when they need to shop. (working poor and the elderly) Perhaps some other grocers will take the spots.

FWIW, I hate to shop at Albertson's and will avoid them at all costs. It's like, if you could imagine the biggest supermarket in Northern Idaho, it would be a mega-Albertson's. The selection is so pedestrian. Not a lot of icky scary "foreign" foods. In my area Raley's is much better.

It is the mega-Safeway in Coeur d'Alene. There is nothing pedestrian about this store whatsoever.

What you Idaho-insulters seem not to realize is that Idaho, over the last forty or so years, has been steadily overrun with Californians. It started out as a bunch of freepers fleeing the encroaching liberal takeover of California. Now it's celebrities who can buy an acre with a really great home on it, with views of one of the most beautiful lake systems in the United States, for only a million dollars. (This is not settling well with the native Idahoans who, not so long ago, were able to buy those exact lots with those exact homes for the highway-robbery price of $150,000. I better edit and tell you WHY $150,000 for a home on an acre with a view of Coeur d'Alene Lake is highway robbery. Specifically, it's in Harrison. Harrison is on a real narrow, real twisty two-lane highway that becomes absolutely impassable every time it snows, which is an everpresent danger. The "medical facilities" in Harrison consist of two volunteer paramedics and an ambulance. If you need anything done that a paramedic can't handle, you either get driven 20 miles to the hospital in St. Maries--which is better than it was when I lived there but it's still about as advanced as the 4077th MASH--or you get driven to the Harrison exit for I-90 so a helicopter can pick you up and fly you to Coeur d''Alene, where they have a very good hospital that can handle almost anything, or to Sacred Heart in Spokane, which is about as good as hospitals get. You can't buy serious food in Harrison. You can only buy gas there in the summer--the guy who owns the gas station runs it mainly to fuel boats, and he closes in the winter. And because of Harrison's topology--it's on the side of a very steep mountain--it can't grow. No one can figure out why anyone would pay a million dollars to live in this town--but people are.) And property taxes never were outrageous.

Californians bring Californian palates with them--which Idaho supermarkets are now well equipped to supply. (Mainly because they know that if they don't have the things Californians like, Spokane isn't that far away and you've always been able to get some pretty cool stuff there.)

The only real problem Idaho has it it contains Duane Hagadone and a lot of people who are willing to send people like Helen Chenoweth and Larry Craig to Washington and Dirk Kempthorne to the governor's mansion. Ohhhhhh...they got some grade-A freepers there. However, they did police up the Aryan Nations and I think they've run the devil worshippers out of Rathdrum. Oh, and they don't let the neo-Nazis celebrate Hitler's birthday at Coeur d'Alene City Park anymore.

I expect to see some of the Jewel Stores closing soon. They're part of Albertson's and are union.

Includes 4 in my suburb alone...but there a shitload of them here, anyway..and they wonder why some don't do well. I have two of them within 2 miles of my house.


http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/060706dnbusalbertson.17c4c8fe.html

The new owner of Albertsons stores in Dallas-Fort Worth and other markets is ceding some ground in the fiercely competitive battle for grocery dollars.

Albertsons LLC – formed this month after the split sale of the then-No. 4 U.S. grocery chain – said Tuesday that it's closing 11 unprofitable stores in Dallas-Fort Worth and 19 others in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Stores in four other divisions from Northern California to Florida were also learning of closings Tuesday.

"The decision to close these stores was made to make the rest of the stores healthier," Mr. Emmons said. "It was a tough decision for me because some of these underperforming stores were hot spots for us, but neighborhoods change."

Most of the area stores slated for closure are in direct competition with Wal-Mart Supercenters, including two that recently opened along the Dallas North Tollway in North Dallas and Plano. Another is on Forest Lane in Lake Highlands, across LBJ Freeway from a Wal-Mart Supercenter under construction. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has the highest concentration of stores in D-FW, with more than 100 Supercenters, Neighborhood Markets and Sam's Clubs.

closed some Ralph's supermarkets, one of them on Elk Grove Blvd. only opened a year and half ago.

FIRST. and more so if they don't own a car or live near a bus, etc. line.

and when the poor can't eat well, they have more sickness. our health care has crashed. more deaths. morticians will be busy.

drag the criminal bushmilhousegang out of our White House

And they have been around nearly forever. I'm pretty sure they are in bankrupcy and are trying to reorganize. They have closed and sold many stores and lost many employees.

This is a classic ploy. Walmartization is the future and it's probably too late to do anything about it. As highly paid grocery workers are scrutinized on tv, people out "there" who are barely struggling by on $9.00 an hour, have little sympathy for union grocery workers..

This is how union busting works.. The press touts the HIGH wages they earn as the REASON the stores are not profitable. they rarely disclose the BAD corporate decisions or the highly paid CEOS .. There's a lot of envy too.. When I left the industry in 1996, I was a journeyman clerk making $16.73 an hour with FULL benefits...Now they have whittled away and have a "tiered" pay scale, benefits are taking more and more money from the employees, and there is mass job-insecurity.. They have been able to do this because the media and walmartians have eaten into support for the grocery unions..

There's something deviously delicious about envy & greed when it's applied to division. If enough people actually LIKE the idea of taking away a highly paid worker's perks, to some it's almost as good as getting them for themselves :(