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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand all the talk here about grocery store monopolies - there's still Walmart, Target, and Aldi, with Lidl now starting to move in on that action, not to mention the regional chains such as Giant Eagle, Meijer, Marc's, Publix and Piggly Wiggly amongst several others. At least where I live I'm seeing more and more competition in the grocer space, not less. I don't see how this merger is going to change that.

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Many, many places don't have that competition. Plenty of communities are at risk of losing their two local grocery stores and seeing them become just one.

Grocers are not evenly distributed, so while you are correct that at a national level there exists competition, it doesn't exist everywhere.

And while a monoculture in an area might represent an opportunity for a grocery store to disrupt things, the people living in that monoculture gain no benefit from that opportunity - they have to live with the monoculture until someone maybe fixes the problem.

What I want to see is the the change in the percent of people who only have access to one brand umbrella of large grocery store crosstabbed against various distances (5,10,20 miles).

Will this take the number of people with a single brand of grocery stores within 10 miles from 10% to 20% or 5% to 7%? I really have no idea.

5 miles is a huge, huge area. Half a mile is probably more reasonable. Plenty of folks need to walk to their grocery store.

Even so, my understanding is there's not much overlap between Kroger and Albertsons so I'd expect their merger to have minimal impacts to local markets.

Anecdotally, there areas of my town (and adjacent towns) with a Kroger-owned store across the street from an Albertson's-owned store. I expect this merger will quickly result in the overlapping stores to be closed, those jobs to be lost and for the large empty retail space to negatively impact other adjacent businesses.

This merger feels like it'll be bad for consumers and bad for the local economy of markets with overlap.

The last time this happened (Albertsons/Safeway), many of my local Albertsons locations were spun out to another company to appease regulators. That company failed almost immediately and Albertsons bought those locations back.

In my area the chain grocers are now Albertsons and Kroger. That’s it.

The regional chain is Stater Bros.

I don’t know if Southern California is an anomaly or not though.

I was guessing that you were in Oregon or Washington because something similar happened here: a local chain (Haggen) tried to take over a bunch of stores and ended up in bankruptcy.

Trying to take over 5X times as many stores as you were running before is a huge operational challenge. Haggen also alleged bad information from Albertson's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggen

Nope. California, but yes it was Haggen. Thanks for reminding me of the name, I had forgotten it! I remember going there once and being gobsmacked at how expensive the place was. Like they were trying to charge Whole Foods prices for a regular grocery store.

> Trying to take over 5X times as many stores as you were running before is a huge operational challenge.

It reminded me of Frontier (tiny little telco) buying up a huge chunk of Verizon's wireline business in 2009. They still run it, but it's been rough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Communications#Purcha...

The firm that owned Haggen paid for most of those stores by selling off most of the real estate and sticking the stores with rental payments. As I recall they expanded into CA, AZ, and NV before failing.

I don't have a good timeline in my head but I remember they did a push to make the stores nicer, adding things like a wine bar. And then suddenly they were heading downhill. They had good produce, but I think some of that was turnover. Once the customers moved stores that went away.

Only grocers in my gigantic city are Kroger, Albertsons, and Target(which basically no one uses as a pure grocer), plus boutique places like trader joes. We don't have walmart. Aldi is starting to move in, and Amazon has a couple whole foods and seems to be building more, but that's a few stores for millions of people. The vast majority of people only have Albertsons or Kroger within a reasonable distance.

Millions of people are being served by three grocers? The metro area for my city is just shy of two million. We have Walmart, Kroger, Meijer, Giant Eagle, Target, Aldi, Trader Joe, Whole Foods, Marc's, IGA, Sam's Club, Costco, and Saraga (which is an international supermarket with every kind of produce from around the world) - not to mention all the specialty stores like the Mexican, Mediterranean, Indian, and Asian grocers. Almost all of these stores are within 5 miles of my house - the Costco is an outlier and the IGA is 6 miles away. I wonder how our cities came to be so different - especially when it sounds like yours is a larger city yet has fewer options?

Depends where you live I suppose. I live in an area where there must be at least a dozen different grocery stores in a twenty miles radius. But I'm sure there's plenty of places in the country where that's not the case.

As I posted elsewhere, Seattle has about 30 standard chain grocery stores within city limits and all are owned by Albertsons or Kroger. The rest are smaller operations, boutiques like like Trader Joe's, or higher-priced like Whole Foods. There is no Walmart in Seattle, and many of the 4-5 Targets are smaller stores with limited selection.

Keep in mind that both Kroger and Albertsons each already own several other large grocery store brands, so some of that abundance of choice is an illusion.

Good point! Didn't think of that.

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