The smash and grab of Kroger-Albertsons
mattstoller.substack.com
mattstoller.substack.com
Folks get invested in their local grocery stores, we do at least.
And we were neck deep in the last merger with Safeway, since it destroyed the store that we went to.
Albertsons bought Safeway, but as part of the deal, they had to sell off some of the stores (which made sense, our store, Vons, was right across the street from the local Albertsons store). Somehow, Hagans (a small northwest chain) got roped in to sell the extra stores too. Hagans "overnight" grew from, like, 12 stores to over 200.
Shockingly, the transition did not go well, there were cries of shenanigans, and Albertsons ended up buying all of the stores back. Some of the local stores that closed due to the merger reopened, other's didn't.
Our store never reopened. In over 8 years, that space and sat empty in the downtown area. My mustache twisting cynicism tells me that Albertsons is keeping the lease on that space, and keeping it empty, to prevent an Aldi from renting it out and setting up shop right across the street.
Didn't help, turns out one is moving in down the street after renovating a closed hardware store. Maybe they'll give the space up now.
That merger was a mess, caused a lot of disruption, cost a bunch of jobs.
We shop at Albertsons, there's a Ralphs (Kroger) closer, but we like Albertsons better. With 3 years of COVID induced "new normal", I'm not looking forward to the collateral damage from a merger like this.
Empty properties that once had a grocery store in them are often that way because the property is under a restrictive covenant preventing any use as a grocery store for some absurdly long period of time (decades, usually)[1]. It's a weirdly unique thing about grocery stores, and can be really harmful to communities where it's just not practical to build new grocery store buildings (and grocery store buildings don't always translate well to other kinds of retail).
It's a common enough problem that it's banned in some places[2].
[1] an example: https://www.marketplace.org/2018/01/12/when-grocery-stores-c...
[2] eg. DC: https://code.dccouncil.us/us/dc/council/laws/22-138
As I understand it, there is mixed case law on whether and when restrictive covenants constitute property interests of the beneficiaries which must be separately compensated in ED condemnation.
But former grocery store is now a church is kinda fun too
After making the switch it's hard to shop at a typical grocery store. Everything is ridiculously marked up and the floor plan is ridiculously sprawling.
driving away exactly the sort of customer Aldi doesn't want to deal with. this policy isn't for cart pusher wage savings, it's a soft filter to screen out a whole class of people who get disproportionately angry with minor inconveniences.
the whole process is about selecting for clientele who are willing to recognize that they have some obligations as a customer to work with the model on an individual level if they want to maximize its effectiveness on a group level.
its just the same group psychology behind coupon clipping in a different disguise.
B) If I owned a car, I'd have a toll tag, and we haven't used change for tolls in close to 2 decades.
There were a few of the stores here and there and I noticed the parking lots were always empty. I guess pissing people off before they buy something is bad for business.
This is a claim. Is there evidence? Especially at a reasonable wage for a human being (which is not federal minimum)?
> Leaving the items in the container wastes shelf space & time by disallowing spring loaded or gravity dispensers
Shelf space: Aldi seems to do a pretty good job of keeping everything they want to put out fronted. As for spring or gravity dispensers, I can go look around a different supermarket and the only place I see gravity dispensers is in some (not all) drink coolers and some (not all) spices. If they showed efficiency bonuses, I'd suspect that we'd see them more.
> lacks self service kiosks & usually have 1 lane open
No self-service? Sure. One lane open? Not where I am. There's usually multiple open and even when there are, with three carts in line, they call another cashier.
Store (% of $spent) (# store) % of $spent/ # store
Dollar Tree 0.8 7900 0.000101265822785
Dollar General 1.5 10000 0.00015
Aldi 2.3 2200 0.001045454545455
Target 2.4 1900 0.001263157894737
Trader Joe’s 1 600 0.001666666666667
Ahold Delhaize 4.3 2000 0.00215
Whole Foods 1.1 500 0.0022
Publix 3.7 1300 0.002846153846154
Walmart 18 4700 0.003829787234043
BJ’s 0.8 200 0.004
Sam’s Club 3.6 600 0.006
Kroger 8.8 1400 0.006285714285714
H-E-B 1.9 300 0.006333333333333
Costco 6.4 600 0.010666666666667
Albertsons 4.7 400 0.01175
Amazon.com 1.3 0 #DIV/0!
More upscale -> Better margins allowing for not only more employees, but also better overall employee benefits marginal that they are.
I'd expect they consume a fair bit of stocking labour to feed the cans in one at a time, and possibly dealing with malfunctions or breakage, compared with "pull the front off the crate and slide it onto the shelf"
ALDI's entire brand image is "lower price". That's why people go there.
They've since gone back to being Albertsons so I don't know what the point of any of it was.
Stuffing Labor is just as loathsome as private equity stuffing all other stake holders. Though I'm certain Labor suffered during the last debacle, I'd accept that it was just a happy side effect and not the primary motivator.
Prior covert Union busting is worth noting given the corptocracy's current well publicized jihad against Labor.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/retail/haggens-risky-e...
There also were some union shenanigans mentioned in this article. A happy side effect is probably the right description. https://www.heraldnet.com/business/inside-the-haggen-grocery...
My old neighbor was a union organizer. eg had bumper sticker that said "QFC: Rewarding hard work with low wages." He explained to me that new owners Kroger were roughing up the smaller QFC union before going after Fred Meyer's.
Aside: So sad. I grew up with QFC. Beloved. Kroger sucked it dry. I understand why QFC had to sell out. Those who didn't got ploughed under. But it's still unfortunate.
That said, landlords often try to not allow “going dark” and paying rent. Usually, grocery is an anchor, and the rents at the smaller stores are higher per square foot. Those will close if the anchor closes and stops advertising the location. Not to mention crime increases, etc.
On the other hand, grocery store sizes are weird for other uses, and there can be a small set of interested parties. And if they are all a pass, then you have an empty store. The original store left for a reason.
Eventually, the larger half of the partitioned building became a Smart & Final, the smaller side became a Dollar Tree, and the Wells Fargo and Panda Express reappeared in the adjacent strip mall.
It is kinda funny (Stop & Shop or starvation I say!). I suspect it is because getting groceries is one of the rare shopping activities that is just 100% always a chore. Like if you are going clothes or electronics shopping, you are probably hoping to stumble across something surprising. Food -- I know what food I want, no need for novelty, I just want to get in and out.
I mostly shop a Trader Joes, aside from other specific things I may need at a specialty store.
They have been passive-aggressive about online ordering and have basically been forced into it by a perceived competition with Amazon (abject paranoia). They hate it.
For some reason you can never get all of the items on your order. They have "been trying to fix this" for years now. At one point, over two years ago, I was in talks with recruiters about joining the team that was "trying to fix it" at Kroger.
Their software dev ranks and tech in general is a fast revolving door. I refused to join because of all the people I knew who had joined and left almost immediately.
The last thing you want is a bigger Kroger. My initial take was that this merger would be the thing that causes them to fail.
That's before you even get into tracking where in the store the items might be, because they're not always in the same location, end caps, etc.
And then on top of that add lazy pickers who are just trying to finish as many orders as they can, and the "not available" button is right there ...
I hope you have the great, good fortune to have someone in your life that complements you in this regard :-)
>As Kroger CEO told his shareholders: "a little bit of inflation is always good in our business" because it lets him raise prices and "customers don’t overly react."
etc, etc.
Kroger's most recent reported net profit margin was 1.7% with gross margins (e.g. before company expenses) in the 22% range.
Compare that to the SaaS companies, where many of us collect our paychecks, that can have gross margins in the 60-90% range.
If you want to call companies out for price gouging and excessive profit margins, taking Kroger to task for a 1.7% net margin seems kind of silly. Especially when most of us engineers are collecting paychecks from companies with far, far higher margins than that.
Do they? Or are things like food deserts transitive symptoms of deeper problems? E.g. that the surrounding area is poor and getting poorer. If so, no amount of legislation will change that
Programs like SNAP, the earned income tax credit, subsidized child-care, and refundable tax credits for children have an immediate impact. Legislation could also provide a universal basic income.
If that's too pink a set of approaches to reduce the impact of poverty for you, governments can also subsidize development of new housing and invest in infrastructure upgrades that draw folks with higher incomes into a community. This works best if you are in a metropolitan area. In rural communities, it's not uncommon to pour great sums of money into courting large employers, giving them land or tax free status for extended periods.
Hell, if your goal is just to get a grocery store, pour on enough subsidies and someone will show up to collect that money.
The more money there is to be made in the grocery sector, the more grocers there will be to compete for it, located in the places where the money flows. Likewise the leaner they have to operate, the more they'll shut down in marginal territory that can't support their business, and the more areas will go without convenient access.
If selling groceries in low-access areas for low profits is indicated by the necessity of food, then nobody is stopping you from doing it; but as the grandparent comment hinted, if you find your niche in high-margin software instead then you're following the money, just like grocers do.
Kroger et. al provide no unique value - they don't have any intellectual property, they have almost zero human capital because they treat their workers terribly and have low retention. They do some stuff with their private labels but that's really it. What grocery stores doing that commands more than a 1 or 2% margin on a huge segment of the economy? If they're earning more than that it is probably and indication that they are ripping off the consumer, ripping off the worker, or both.
They are not earning more than that. Kroger's net margins were 1.7%. That was the entire point of my post.
I don't think we've seen that scope here in the US... Yet. But given the number of guns, "it's a when, not an if" if the politicians allow extreme food scarcity to happen in a wide area.
panem et circusensus (bread and circuses)
The way I see it is that any food desert either exists because it is not profitable or because nobody has taken the initiative to offer a profitable service. Obviously I could be wrong, but I have a hard time seeing how a megacorp is denying access to food.
Ah yes, it's important to remember we should only care about ourselves.
Arizona Iced Tea started at 99 cents in 1997 - today that should be $1.83 but it's still 99 cents. Same with Costco's hot dog and chicken (though they've done some noticeable changes on the hot dog).
When the dam breaks, it's not going to go up 10%, it's going to skyrocket to try to make up for lost time.
Food prices have been changing for a long time, but only if you pay attention to quantity and ingredients. With gas prices, the unit quantity or ingredient cannot change, so the change is obvious. Same with things like milk and eggs and vegetables though, which do change often.
With processed food, the seller has much more ability to maneuver around having to increase price.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/071015/what-profit-...
Logically, if the same quantity of Arizona Ice Tea retails for the same price as it did 25 years ago, then someone in the supply chain is or was making huge profit margins, considering the increase in materials and transport costs.
https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/
Depending on how you set your endpoints, you can basically come up with any number for inflation you want, from 1.7% to 20+%
I guess this is all well-understood and taken care of under the hood by processed food companies, though, since the Big Mac Index has pretty steadily held to an inflation level near the CPI
They do play with pennies. I worked in a huge national restaurant chain as a teenager and went through numerous menu updates. They were always flipping nickels and pennies all over the place on the menu. As a kid I thought changing the menu prices by five cents was ridiculous. Apparently, that's how it works in this business with razor thin margins.
This is actually just not even controversial, completely supported by data.
Nominal profits would have to increase for profit margins (which are already low single digits for grocery stores) to be maintained.
Purchasing power doesn't magically decrease, it's a function of increasing prices.
Think about for a little. If a companies input costs have increased by 10% their profit will decrease right, maybe not by 10% but it will decrease. So if they increase their prices they can get back to their previous profit level. Instead they have increased prices even more such that their profit is HIGHER than it was before inflation.
QED
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/profit-m...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ACI/albertsons/pro...
Obviously, a 3% profit margin after a year of inflation is going to be nominally higher than a 3% profit margin before the year of inflation.
Hence any whining about nominal increases in profit is innumeracy, or clickbait, especially for businesses that play in the sub 5% profit margin ranges.
How low do people think grocery store profit margins should go? Have they tried successfully operating a business at 3% profit margin?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-25/us-corpor...
Highest margins since 1950.
Turns out there are businesses that aren't Grocers.
Are _margins_ increasing (I don’t know) - because that would be the required condition to conclude nefariousness.
Inflation since Jan 2020 is 15% according to BLS.
If corp profits go up 15% the real profit increase is 0%
From what I can tell, the biggest gains have been at companies that have very strong profits and prospects due to high barriers of entry to their business, and the companies with steady but small profits do okay, and the companies not earning any profits have shown losses.
Over 50% of the rise in prices for groceries during the pandemic are from corporate profits. Raises in input costs (38%) and labor (7%) made up most of the rest. When the price raise is 50% increased profit during a time where a large fraction cannot afford enough to eat this is price gouging. It is extremely clear.
ref: https://www.salon.com/2022/10/19/katie-porter-pulls-out-char... , https://porter.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/gross-pr...
Most states define it as charging inflated prices during a crisis or emergency, not simply raising prices beyond what geraldyo thinks is reasonable.
Wikipedia: "Price gouging occurs when a seller increases the prices of goods, services, or commodities to a level much higher than is considered reasonable or fair."
edit: updating with proof, Texas state definition is "selling or leasing fuel, food, medicine, or another necessity at an exorbitant or excess price, or demanding an exorbitant or excessive price in connection with the sale or lease of fuel, food, medicine or another necessity."
https://www.in2013dollars.com/Food/price-inflation/2108-to-2...
then there's the question of does the union have any real leverage, which varies a lot by industry and trade. ufcw for example has failed both in securing real wins for grocery workers AND in pushing against price gouging by grocers
after being failed by nationals (for me it was usually cwa), tried going more wildcat but iww are just as ineffectual for different reasons, then got involved in the co-op space but groups like usfwc are just as ineffectual for still different reasons
edit: for proof here's how Texas defines it per https://www.galvestoncountytx.gov/our-county/district-attorn...:
"selling or leasing fuel, food, medicine, or another necessity at an exorbitant or excess price, or demanding an exorbitant or excessive price in connection with the sale or lease of fuel, food, medicine or another necessity."
The illusion of competition. Then within that single company posing as many are found food products sold by a handful of megacompanies like Kraft, Nestle and General Mills, each posing as a multitude of companies "competing" with one another.
For this and other reasons, it's best to cook and eat whole foods (onions, sweet potatoes, etc.) instead of consuming foodlike products that were manufactured.
But it is starting to look like there's going to be Kroger and Publix (if you live far enough south). Meanwhile our government agencies are over there playing with their fiddles.
But, yes: nobody in our area is under the illusion that Fred Meyer and QFC (or Safeway and Albertsons) compete with each other.
There's a lot of Kroger-labeled things on the shelves, so it's clear they're owned by the same company.
Another option are the organic-only stores, like Natural Grocers.
QFCs are essentially just the "Grocery" department from Fred Meyer. Remove Home Goods, Apparel and Electronics from FM and you've got yourself a QFC.
Edit: Someone step in here and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's Kroger's basic MO. Even Ralph's and their Kroger-branded stores just feel like the exact same grocery store as QFC and FM's grocery department.
And (sorry to rant, lol), yeah, a dude named Fred Meyer in Portland really did found the store in the 1920's, but do y'all have to put his picture and a big spiel about him and "local community" up at the front of your store when we all know that the present-day reality of FM is bullshit?
I live in the PNW and almost never go to Kroger/Safeway stores. I just want groceries, I don’t want to have to wade through endless cruft to get there.
The best one, Winco. And of course, Walmart, Target, Costco, New Seasons, Trader Joe’s, Grocery Outlet, Natural Grocers, etc. Lidl and Aldi are making huge gains nationwide too.
How did tiny Boise, Idaho birth both the worst mega-grocer (Albertsons) and one of the best?
PCC may work for some folks, but they don't carry some fairly basic things like... Coke. (also crazy expensive).
But Amazon already has a big PNW chain (and nationally, too): Whole Foods
You can go to the parent company's website and see the list of brands. For example: https://www.generalmills.com/food-we-make/brands
This kind of thing generally happens because brands being acquired by a new parent company already have a brand image and some amount of customer loyalty, and targets a particular price bracket or demographic. Rebranding the products would be bad for business.
People bring up the same kind of argument when they talk about Luxottica making many of the famous brands of sunglasses, as if it's a conspiracy or somehow makes the product evil or inauthentic. I don't get it. Products should be evaluated on their own merits, and branding is not evil per se.
* HEB
* walmart
* brooks brothers
* fiesta
* 99 ranch market/other asian stores
* lots of good carnicerias
* costco
there's an aldi but i've been a few times and it's a awful experience and i don't think most people go there but there's still plenty of options. there's probably something specific about where you are that's pushed towards that situation if there are no options.
kraft, nestle and general mills make name brands. most of the stores i just listed offer store brands that are basically the same thing for cheaper. you don't have to buy from the megacompanis.
mostly agree on the whole foods argument, though.
I'm only kind of kidding.
Much of the American Myth is predicated on the idea that capitalism produces competition and therefore people can trust that what is available is the best quality at the lowest price. If people aren't fooled into thinking that there's actually competition, they'll be willing to go farther afield to find a competitive option.
It would probably work fine for the stated purpose (not missing many important owners, not listing overly many).
* blackrock
* vanguard
* fidelity
* state street
* t. rowe price
* most major banks
* some random asset managers
on like 90% of products? why tf bother? that doesn't actually mean anything to most people and nobody really cares.
Of course that would probably mean every store was just called "BlackRock"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Basket_protests
Though Trader Joes (Aldi North ) is here, Aldi just started opening up here. Those style markets are affordable, but don't have the selection of the Market Baskets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi
I wonder if the fact that these are privately held is an advantage.
Corporations are in the business of increasing profit - Covid didn't magically incentivize companies to become more greedy than before. Corporations are always greedy. Why leave any profit on the table? Take for example, a tech worker that has learned to switch jobs every few years, increasing base+bonus with each job change. Are they greedy?
Agree that we should cease carve out and resume chartering corporations to serve the public interest.
We had FIVE stores when the local chain owned them. Kroger bought them out, and slowly closed them. Each neighborhood had its own Kroger.
They built a shiny new big store where an old A&P was. And then, closed the two reimagining "old" Krogers.
It was great at first, huge bakery, a cheese section, olive bar, all new coolers etc. But the store quickly went to crap. It's also packed because half the city is there in any given day.
They bragged about spending millions refreshing the store, but they can't even have more than 2-3 checkout lanes open.
This has all gotten worse during the pandemic. It's almost as bad as Walmart now.
Long lines at limited checkout lines is awful. Supermarkets do it because they don't want to hire more staff. Consumers notice it and will shop elsewhere... unless they live in a place where there are no nearby competing supermarkets.
It's OK to dislike the deal because you see a beloved brand being absorbed. It's even OK to dislike the deal because you hate private equity.
But aggregating up to a 15% market share doesn't look like a monopoly concern to me.
With this kind of geography, we're likely to lose at least one Safeway (it's literally across the street from Freddy's), and possibly one or another of those not-too-far-away Freddy's and Safeways. It's not exactly going to create a food desert, but real choice will go way down. I already split my shopping between Fred Meyer and Walmart, mostly because of supply concerns between the two.
the issue that we the people, and by extension our antitrust regulators, care about is market distortion, and 15% is well within the range at which a competitor can unduly distort a market in their favor by sheer size alone. markets exist for the benefit of society as a whole, not just giant corporations.
- Not all grocery stores are fungible in the category. Safeway and Whole Foods cater to a very different clientele at different price points
- That is a nationwide amount, but locally may be very different. There are no Walmarts in the city limits of Seattle
- This is not just about customers, but suppliers as well
Now, there are still plenty of choices for me - I could go to a PCC, Whole Foods, Costco, Amazon Fresh, etc. Not every city has the same options, and turning a market with 3 or 4 competitors into 2 or 3 is still a material change, as ew have seen in other industries.
My point was less "This is fine," and more, "This is inconsistent." Sorry if that didn't come across.
Walmart, notably, didn't get there by agglomerating smaller grocery brands. They grew it organically, if with a lot of shady tactics. So there's not really a point at which regulators could have prevented the whole thing; they can only take proactive action.
Whereas here, they have an opportunity to stop a problem reactively.
Some, like Kroger and Albertsons, price some things low and some things high, betting that people coming into the store for a lower priced product will pay more for the convenience of not having to go to another store. And this is frequently accomplished by giving out coupons (e.g. some things are losing them money, some are at cost, some are at 100% profit margin).
See JC Penney’s disastrous experiment with removing sales/coupons and just offering low prices.
Food is going to get more expensive, lower quality and supplied by less producers.
This is America, where muscular middlemen squeeze out the middle class so that capital flows to the top.
Margin for producers? Not gonna happen.
And for consumers? raise prices and lower portion sizes until profits start to decline.
Rent-seeking is the American dream
People use “rent seeking” to mean “people making money in ways I don’t like”.
And having lived in other countries I benefit greatly as a consumer being able buy things cheaper at places like Walmart.
I assume it is everyone’s dream.
In either case, there might be some people that would eschew that, but I doubt the population of people that would accept (or dream about it) it is restricted to “Americans”.
Or what's the probability of creating one in your lifetime, from the bottom? That's what those in debt are thinking, that's what those without a stake in the profits are angry about.
I'm just saying that's not my dream (to be born rich).
- The producers
- The consumers
- The employees
It's easy to picture consumers being squeezed the least by this, but maybe not.
Plus all of the comments here are discussing the impact of the merger, and not the highway robbery that it identifies as a core problem. Frustrating.
Now I know alot of people will say who cares, lots of grocery stores owned by one company what could happen? Well having a chain this big they could raise the price of food in many cities to whatever they want with no repercussions as people have to eat and there is no more competition. I know in my city this merger would mean we would have no grocery stores that are not owned by Kroger(Walmart and Target still sell food though). Its a pretty scary proposition.
I suspect the reason for this is Albertsons is facing heavy competition from other grocery stores, their financials look terrible.
A lot of established grocery stores are getting upended at the lower end by Aldi/Lidl/Walmart/Target/Costco, and at the higher end by Whole Foods/Trader Joes/etc.
Kind of reflects income/wealth gap trends. You are either selling at the lowest prices, or you are selling at higher prices to a niche population on the rich side of town.
Edit: ignore this comment, I had wrong information.
The 4b special dividend that will be issued will go to two PE firms. According to the author’s analysis this will strip out the working capital and enrich the PE participants. Likely sending the company and by extension the workers to the debt markets.
I didn’t read the financials but if true this is just shithead financial engineering. :(
I do not see how the special dividend can legally go to two firms. It would have to go to all shareholders.
Cerebrus does own 150M/475M shares = 30% of Albertsons, but for some reason, I do not see Apollo in the list of top shareholders.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ACI/holders/
But their press release from May 2020 says they bought 17.5% of Albertsons:
https://www.apollo.com/media/press-releases/2020/05-20-2020-...
It seems unlikely that they would engineer this with the exception that it would fail, thus destroying their company.
Kroger has been a bit more ruthless in the last 5 years, and basically pulled an IBM in late 2019:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/02/kroger-to-lay-off-hundreds-a...
They called it "middle management" in press release but they fired tons of senior people in the stores that had been around a long time (anyone over 50 who'd been at the company more than 25 years was a good candidate). In any case - management at a grocery store might as well be a blue collar job in comparison to most any other white collar job. The severance package was decent - most got 9 months pay. Still, getting canned in your 50s from one of the only jobs you've ever known isn't pleasant, but it didn't surprise me. Management at the established grocery businesses. There was a lot of talk about The Bear in the restaurant industry - the grocery industry at the departmental management level and above is similar, albeit usually less ruthless and a lot more petty. Everyone gets written up a lot and their jobs hung over their head often. I think it's probably gotten a bit better in the last decade though, partially as some of the old people have started to be replaced with college grads I suppose.
As for Safeway, I've been in the bay area since 2010 and I can't really say I'd shed a tear to see Safeway under different management. I remember my introduction to Safeway when I went to buy eggs and bacon and was shocked to see it at $7/package in 2010. I settled for the Jimmy Dean sausage at the time, because it was on sale. This simple introduction holds true -most Safeway prices are out of line with a reasonable price _unless_ things are on sale. That was not something that was true at Smith's, or Winco, or even Raley's (Nob Hill Foods) in general. Safeway even took over Andronico's in the bay area and _raised_ prices even more - while reducing the product quality and selection. Compared to Whole Foods, prices are actually competitive on a day-to-day basis. The best thing Safeway has going for itself at this point is that is that it's ubiquitous and it usually has self-checkout lanes (which is the only way to get in and out of a store in a reasonable amount of time anymore).
To sum it up - I think Kroger is on a path to trying to turn more profit at the expense of workers and consumers alike, but I don't think Safeway can get much worse either. It's going to be shit all the way down, you just hope it's not the super smelly kind.
So, like long-term care insurance. Biggest scam I've ever personally encountered.
If you just meant you had trouble getting LTC to payout, that may be. The payout ratio is close to 1.0, slightly better for women and significantly worse for men (the women-to-men ratio is skewed among the elderly.) So the industry makes its money on float like other competitively-priced insurance products.
But it’s still difficult to qualify for a good home or get in-home care approved and started. Staying in it longer than six months is also challenging, and can draw extra scrutiny since patients who stay longer than that are likely to stay closer to two years, which makes the policy a big money-loser.
It doesn’t help that most agents only sell LTC as an add-on to boost their production, rather than consult with it as an expertise.
When 50,000 people own all portions of the economy, every unnecessary white collar worker “optimized” out of a job, every blue collar worker replaced by robotics, where is our society?
This is anti competitive behavior, perpetuated by Wall Street that is enabled by the tax code.
Independent / other grocers can’t compete because the fundamentals of the business have nothing to do with the game being played.
Completely ignores history / human nature.
The genius of part time politicians and limited government was that it protects us from ourselves. We are indeed our own worst enemy. The only incentive for public service should be public service. The lack of skin in game with huge upside leads to idiocy like million dollar bus stops, 10k toilets and anti-trust enforcers becoming m&a lawyers.
Career politicians and lobbying plus the “retirement” back door to Wall Street, consulting and big business in general has completely distanced the US government from those who it purports to serve. At this point it’s basically like an asshole king who uses the monopoly on taxes to enrich themself. Except that the asshole king is a cohort of a class of people and Wall Street.
In hindsight this is inevitable. At least the previous monarchy believes in noblesse oblige.
Belated Welcome! We need more people like you
I bet it does go through
Obama's presidency was awful. Every promise to the center/left broken, and a huge, continuous giveaway to the right, who repaid him by slapping him in the face. He implemented Romney's healthcare plan. He kept the bankers out of jail / gallows after the 2008 crisis -- "Too big to fail". (The bankers repaid Obama's kindness by heavily funding the GOP.) He kept us in Afghanistan. And Republicans hated him for giving them everything they wanted. So frustrating to watch.
> It’s a bit like a private equity firm blood-letting someone after buying the person a life insurance policy the private equity firm then gets to collect.
Companies are not people, their existence has no worth on its own.