BUILDING A BETTER FUTURE
How It All Started
Despite our nation’s growing economic anxiety, historic rates of inflation, and fears of recession brought on by rising food and consumer prices, Kroger and Albertsons are pushing for a corporate merger that could give them almost unchecked control over retail food prices, grocery store access, the food supply chain, and the wages and benefits of essential workers who were critical to our nation’s day-to-day survival during the pandemic.
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), this merger would lower wages for 746,000 grocery workers in over 50 metropolitan areas. That means 1 out of every 4 grocery workers will be affected, regardless of their employer.
The EPI also found that this merger would cause the total annual earnings of grocery workers in affected areas to fall by an estimated $334 million. That is about $450 per worker per year in critical income.
Currently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is undergoing a review of the merger and has the power to take formal legal action to stop the proposed merger. The UFCW is calling on the FTC to exercise its power to block this catastrophic merger.
The FTC needs to hear from concerned Americans across the political and geographic spectrum on how higher prices, fewer options, and lower wages for essential workers would impact their community.
Every hardworking family has a reason to oppose the Kroger Albertsons megamerger - no one can afford the risk of higher prices, fewer choices, and lower wages for essential grocery workers.
- Daisy Calhoun, UFCW 367 Member
Three months after the last merger, hours were cut, checks bounced, and vendors refused to drop off the product without cash payment at the door; it was that bad. One hundred percent that could happen again.
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The FTC says the merger would violate U.S. antitrust laws, which are meant to prevent anticompetitive mergers and monopolies. Announcing its lawsuit, the FTC said a merger of Kroger and Albertsons would lead to higher prices for groceries, fewer consumer choices, and lower-quality products and services.
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In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. horizontal merger policy and apply it to the study of five recent consumer product mergers. We selected the mergers from those that, from the public record, seemed to be most problematic for the antitrust agencies.
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Kroger has responded with an aggressive public relations campaign. Typical of corporations defending anticompetitive mergers, it misrepresents key market dynamics and ignores hard evidence uncovered by FTC investigators, including damning internal documents from both companies.
