The $25B Kroger-Albertsons Merger Is Going to Fail | Hacker News Reader

The $25B Kroger-Albertsons Merger Is Going to Fail

thebignewsletter.com

36 pointstoomuchtodo52 comments

"...executives for both supermarket chains have conceded that Kroger’s acquisition of Albertsons is anticompetitive, with one executive reacting candidly to the proposed deal: “you are basically creating a monopoly in grocery with the merger.”

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/02/...

Kroger made about $2B in profit against about $145B of expenses: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KR/financials/

Albertson's was a bit better, earning $2B in profit against $77B in expenses: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ACI/financials/

(Look at cost of revenue + Operating expenses)

IOW - These businesses are not awash in cash and profits. A slight increase in costs (wages, etc) would wipe out their profits or put them in the red. A slight decrease in costs or increase in prices would help their business quite a lot.

Also, the grocery business overall is very fragmented and local, despite some large chains. And grocers most certainly do not have any ability whatsoever to control market prices or market wages. They are "price takers" in both cases.

Their combined market share would be only ~12%, putting them in second place behind Walmart at ~18% https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2022/10/14/kroger-... There is a long, thick (hold your jokes) tail of grocery stores getting the remaining 3/4 of the market. This is not even remotely a monopoly situation.

>IOW - These businesses are not awash in cash and profits.

$2 Billion is nothing to sneeze at. Not "we make 39 billion a quarter" good but how is this not a healthy business that is unable to compete on their own? Grocery isn't a fast changing iterative business like software, for example

It's all relative to scale. This is why I included the expense numbers as well.

No, these are not particularly "healthy" businesses. They are getting by, no more. A small misstep or exogenous event could be a catastrophe.

Spending $1.45 to make two cents seems like a poor use of resources and we should be happy that someone is even in this business.

they literally make it up in volume or they wouldn't be doing it. no one's running any charities here.

As you identify in your post, the grocery business is highly localized. The FTC identified a ton of cities where their merger would significantly reduce competitive grocery store options. In my city, there are already regions where it's basically a food desert besides the local Kroger and Albertson's chain. If they merge, probably one of the two shuts down, but even if not, the lack of competition means the entire community is at the whims of the regional manager in terms of prices, employment, and overall store quality.

Regardless of your financials provided, the consolidation (once combined) increases their power against suppliers, workers, and consumers. The business must be kept in tension as a defense against well worn maliciousness of corporate actors.

If their costs go up (labor, food suppliers), their prices will go up (and perhaps some margin impact). Combined, they will do the same as landlords, chicken processors, pharma, and so on if allowed to do so: use their power to entrench, collude, and extract. Being in business should not be comfortable. Competition and limited corporate power is the desired end state, work backwards to implementation details.

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/21/matt-stoll...

“Fundamentally, my view is that authoritarianism is coming from the private sector.” -- Matt Stoller (this post's author)

Good. These are already two giant grocery store corporations, there's little reason to support this and a lot of reasons to oppose.

We need more competition, not less. Really wish we could get Aldi or Lidl up in the PacNW. Yeah, there's Trader Joe's as a pseudo-Aldi owned by Aldi, but I'd love the real thing too.

It would be nice to have at least 3 differently owned grocers within reasonable distance for competition.

Oh, there's more than that where I live, if you count all the different grocers.

But it's nowhere close to how competitive grocers in Germany felt to me, when I recently lived in Munich. Where I'm at, the only nearby discount grocer is Grocery Outlet; in Munich, there was Aldi, Lidl, Netto, and Penny, all in less than a 10 minute trip by bike.

Numbeo stats seem to bear this out, with grocery prices in Germany being ~20% lower than the US (and a quick googling indicates even starker differences according to other sites): https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...

What are grocery companies margins in Germany?

You don't have Walmart, Target, Amazon, and/or Costco?

Hmm, after checking my sources, I've determined that none of those are Aldi or Lidl.

> Hmm, after checking my sources, I've determined that none of those are Aldi or Lidl.

Sorry you said an unqualified 'more competition', not more competion in the 'unique' grocery store category of which Kroger does not compete.

Correct, more competition of any kind would be also nice to have.

And more competition that specifically stresses low prices would be particularly nice to have.

Good. Two of the closest grocery stores to me are Fred Meyer and Safeway. They'd probably close the Safeway if this merger goes through. I'm happy enough with FM most of the time but I like having Safeway as an alternative, because they have options FM does not.

I'm not so sure. They like to give consumers the illusion of choice. I live in California and there's lots of Vons right next to Albertsons, and the same company owns both.

I mean Fred Meyer and Safeway are currently owned by the separate companies trying to merge, and that’s a fact. So we should prevent them from merging

I have the same options and personally I'd be perfectly happy to let one or the other go. Ideally it'd make room in the market for something new, since these are almost exactly the same and scarcely a mile apart. There are also plenty of other grocery stores in precisely the same area: both Town and Country Market and Trader Joes, as well as the Ballard farmer's market.

It's strange to me the way that people talk about these stores as if they were their personal property, and theirs to decide whether or not they shut down, without even a mention about the very practical reasons these stores might have to merge or shut down (which may end up happening anyway, even if the merger fails).

if you don't drive, your options are significantly more limited.

Ballard has an unusually high amount of grocery stores for the Seattle area and it's expensive, so it's not like people can just move to Ballard to find competition

Sanity prevailed. It’s not like we need to be gouged even harder for the trash they mostly sell. If folks are still going to “American” grocery stores, go to a local Korean grocery store to see what groceries should look like. Large assortment of fairly inexpensive fresh produce, good meats, some even attractively priced, lots of fresh (even live!) fish and seafood. What prevents Kroger from not giving everyone diabetes, IDK.

It's bizarre at my local Wal-Mart. Cursory selection of rotting, fly-covered (no exaggeration) produce, and then 50 shelves of packaged food. Of the shelves - there is exactly a quarter aisle for canned vegetables and another 1 3/4 just for Nabisco products

And also, no plastic bags, but most of the stuff being sold is wrapped into 1-3 layers of thick, non-biodegradable plastic. Even cucumbers. Makes no sense whatsoever.

If the evidence coming out now is any indicator, I think we will continue to be gouged. The failure of this merger does not suddenly eliminate all of the anti-competitive intent in the executives.

If anything this underscores the fact that this (and many other market segments) are dominated by cartels that actively collude in ways that harm consumers. And the government won't do a damn thing about it.

It's a weird move by the FTC.

Kroger-Albertsons together would have less than half the marketshare of Walmart. It's closer to a third if you include Sam's Club. In practice it would be even less than this, because they're planning to spin off a quarter of the stores.

The decision to set the precedent that union shops can't buy each other is also odd. If non-union stores are allowed to expand but union chains are not, that is invariably setting grocery store unions on a path to shrink even further.

As the article points out there are metros where Kroger and albertsons are close to a duopoly. We dont have walmart in my area, only option other than kroger or albertsons is target or aldi, neither of which are really competing with the traditional grocery store business kroger/albertson run.

Why is collective bargaining power a concern of the FTC? I would have thought that bargaining power would have increased with a merger (despite being smaller overall with layoffs).

The FTC is correct here, but they aren't doing enough to stop the food these companies are buying.

I despise Kroger. I moved from Texas with fantastic HEB, and virginia with Publix to Colorado and we already had absolutely trash grocery stores, but now Kroger owns all of the major ones here. King soopers, etc. Absolutely trash stores.

Cannot believe they keep letting them take over grocers.

Maybe build a new Kroger in all of our food deserts instead of turning a halfway decent store into a dumpster? I live downtown and my nearest real grocery store is a 20 minute DRIVE away. I shop at 711 more than a grocery store outside of instacart.

It's tough for a business to operate in lower volume areas. The fact that you have a real grocery store a drive away probably indicates that there's enough volume at that location to keep prices low. While the added at the sticker overhead of keeping a smaller branch stocked near you might be enough to poison the well of customers by sending some on that drive to save money overall.

A solution to the density problem is different from the lack of competition in dense areas, which is part of what blocking chain mergers is about.

A stranger to your situation, I can only speculate generally. Proper city / urban planning is unpopular with voters. No one likes restrictions. No one likes being told that some little town they live in isn't economically viable and should be wound down and closed up. Or that maybe a local food co-op or other more socialist method such as the government running a wholesale outlet for essentials might be a solution to the market not working for an area. In any event, a government of the people and for the people should ensure fair markets exist, and that where markets don't make sense (usually natural monopolies and also things that are required but don't work economically) a public utility ensures everyone has access to services.

> The fact that you have a real grocery store a drive away probably indicates that there's enough volume at that location to keep prices low.

I'm not sure if I'd consider this the same situation. I'm not in a low volume area, I'm in one of the the densest neighborhoods in the city and unfortunately as nice as a 20 minute drive sounds to some that's absolutely abhorrent when you live downtown in an area like this. Most of my neighbors and friends don't own cars so that's an hour one way bus ride. I only drive my car to go to the pharmacy once a month and that's a 30 minute 4 mile one -way drive. Gotta sign my name for my adhd meds every month for 30 years straight no matter how difficult to get them it is.

Kroger is buying all of these ancient derelict looking grocery stores that have been here for ages. I don't know the last time I saw a grocery store get built in my entire life, and especially not the 4 years I've been in Denver where the (metro) populations gone from (according to google) 2,656,000 to 2,963,000 since 2016.

Of course like you've said well, I really have no idea what goes into the logistics of where or why to put a grocery store so maybe it really just is that low volume to them.

I'm in the "Harlem of the West" neighborhood which is a food desert more by design by 1950s anti-civil rights planners than corporate profits unfortunately, although it may not be that reason any longer.

Not saying that you don't know any of this it's just a topic I'm pretty passionate about and that a lot of people are less familiar with, so maybe some HN'ers will be interested. I wasn't aware of food deserts and how difficult they make peoples lives until I experienced living in one.

There are really great coops that build therapy/education centers with farms that always need donations of time or farm work if anyone is looking for something to volunteer on.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Viewer/index.html?appid=96ae7380...

https://www.cpr.org/show-episode/food-deserts-what-are-they-...

And THIS! From our wonderful Kyle Clark, Supermarket merger could cause damage in food deserts -- There's a huge potential that these mergers will just cause them to close stores.

https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/next/next-with-kyle...

In the case you described I'm inclined to blame BOTH rent-seeking land lords AND a city unwilling to do that politically inconvenient thing. Fail to urban plan rather than allow a an unchecked market that fails consumers by reaching a maximum profit rather than maximum community benefit balance.

This is a short sighted and ignorant piece. The combined business will be 2% of the size of Amazon, 10% of the size of Walmart, and nearly 10% of the size of Costco. They will control ~10% of grocery sales, half that of Walmart. Roughly a quarter of the stores in areas with high overlap are being divested.

If the FTC cared about competition they would go after someone like Amazon/Facebook with nearly 40% market share, Google/Nvidia with over 90%, or even Apple with nearly 90% of market share among teenagers.

Lina Khan's incompetence has been a big boon for lawyers and merger arb strategies, without actually improving the competitive landscape or the world.

Not allowing two crappy grocery retailers in a ridiculously slim margin business to merge at a 15% combined market share is not the sort of antitrust policy we need in the US. Pretty clear that politics is the overriding factor here.

Some one posted here that this creates a monopoly; not even close. Maybe there are local market monopolies but those can be negotiated, plus Amazon and Walmart are a thing almost everywhere.

the problem with undoing the local monopoly is that the divestiture they're proposing is to a place that said they want to get out of the grocery business. so it would probably be close to the same effect as just closing stores outright.

Good point but should these outweigh the rights of companies to combine?

yes, preventing monopolization is the entire point of antitrust law, even if it is regional in nature

At what granularity?

Page ten of the complaint lists nearly every metropolitan area in the West and Mountain West, and some large metropolitan areas east of it to boot. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/d9428_2310004kr...

The can list what they want but clearly they are ignoring Costco, Target, Walmart, Sam's in those large metro areas.

> They asked the question, why are people mad at inflation if the traditional measures of inflation are low

It baffles me people are confused about this. Traditional measures of inflation leave out certain costs of living (and borrowing as the author mentions), however, just because inflation is low NOW does not mean the last 1-3 years of it are reversed. Wages are still fairly stagnant compared to inflation, so you can't just point to an inflation graph in 2024 and be like "why are the peasants angry about their bread prices?" yet this is such a common tone-deaf refrain.

Yeah companies have been like "gee times are tough" when discussing raises in past years to deal with inflation. And now it's cooling off some they point to that as reason for no big raises as well.

And reaping record profits apparently.

I think that's a valid point, but a different one than the one quoted by Summers. They claim sentiment is more closely tied to the cost of borrowing, not unmeasured costs. I am speculating here, but it may be that the American lifestyle is fueled by a revolving line of debt and thus more impacted by the cost of borrowing.

Real median wages are up post covid. The lower class especially has done quite well on average.

They’ve kept pace with inflation? This hasn’t been remotely the case for 30 years so this would be huge news if so.

Not sure where the quote is from but inflation is still above the target of 2% (by traditional measures) so is that not considered high?

If the merger does fail, that will be great news for Walmart.

I thought of Walmart when reading the article too. Conversely, wouldn't the merger be potentially good for Walmart? If one of the effects of the merger is to raise prices, doesn't that imply Walmart could raise prices as well and still be competitive?

(Acknowledging here the merger complaint is based on labor law and not consumer prices)

I'm not sure why, since I haven't read the WSJ opinion piece stating that.

Yup...

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/what-walmar...

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