retailfanmitchell019 wrote: ↑July 5th, 2023, 2:46 pm
I'd think when the hammer comes down and the Feds successfully stop the merger, I've said this before and I'll say it again: the six most profitable Albertsons divisions (PNW, NorCal, SoCal, Southwest, Intermountain, Jewel) will get picked up by Ahold or move on as a more streamlined company. The remains (Denver, Texas, Safeway East/Acme, Shaw's) will get carved up and sold to other buyers.
Letting Comvest/Haggen buy Albertsons/Safeway stores was intentionally about carving up the stores for real estate. Haggen was clearly not interested in operating stores outside of their northern Washington core turf, they intentionally set pricing high to keep the acquired stores from being profitable. Those Haggen stores were meant to fill space temporarily until the inevitable bankruptcy and store sales for real estate.
That was perhaps the dumbest decision the Feds made, allowing a vampire capitalist group like Comvest (acting as Haggen) to buy the stores. It would've made no difference had they sold the stores to Eddie Lampert.
We should be very happy about Haggen because I think the Haggen mess is going to be a big reason why this Albertsons/Kroger merger ends up blocked. Also there is the matter that in the Albertsons/Safeway merger a new competitor was supposed to be created in these markets via Haggen. That did not happen since Haggen failed. So no new competitor was created. So these markets are already "short" a competitor. Then to add insult the last living pieces of the previous "competitor" Haggen ended up in the hands of Albertsons as well, so a competitor was eliminated in the original Haggen markets too.
Haggen had been shrinking in OR/WA for years leading up to their purchase of the Albertsons/Kroger divests. Haggen ran a fantastic operation but missed on some details, price was always a problem, but they made up for everything they did wrong with their quality.
When Haggen moved to CA/NV/AZ and the rest of OR/WA for some inexplicable reason rather than get their really good quality items, they pulled their produce supplier down from OR/WA to handle produce so produce was pretty good, and they pulled some suppliers for meat they were familiar with as well, but somehow the level of produce and meat in CA/NV/AZ was still not the same as the original Haggen stores. Then there was bakery/deli where these Haggen converts were slotting literal crap product basically below the level of the worst grocery chains, like below Save Mart level, rather than their excellent items from their original stores for some inexplicable reason.
Haggen's everyday shelf pricing was actually equal to the Safeway/Albertsons pricing that the stores closed with. That directive was followed during the conversions. The problem was the sale pricing at Haggen was basically non-existent aside from a terrible little 4 page ad with no hot deals (other than 50% off Signature brands to get rid of them in the divested Safeway/Vons units; the Supervalu brands the Albertsons units were slotting at that time were continued to be carried by Haggen in OR/WA so no clearance there but they did clearance them in CA/NV/AZ). So due to a lack of sale prices a basket at Haggen (if they even had the items you wanted for your basket) would cost significantly more than Albertsons/Safeway due to a lack of sale prices at Haggen that previously existed at Albertsons/Safeway.
The biggest thing that killed Haggen was Unified Grocers. Unified Grocers, you would have thought, would have done everything it could to drive volume at what became overnight its largest customer in CA. But they didn't. The various independent member-owners of Unified Grocers like Superior, etc. already were doing plenty of self distribution outside of Unified (wonder why that was..) as it was and clearly Unified in CA was not set up to do much other than provide high cost items to independents and do almost nothing to drive volume. They gave Haggen zero help on promotions, zero help on ads, lousy private label support, super high costs on everything, zero merchandising help/support, and basically are a big reason why the whole Haggen fiasco unwound as fast as it did in SoCal. But it wasn't long after that, that Unified Grocers sold itself to Supervalu. So I guess in the end, Unified grocers got what was coming to it.
Meanwhile up in OR/WA where Haggen was using Supervalu, they were able to keep those stores merchandised noticeably better since they could largely keep stocking them the way Albertsons left them, but the Safeway conversions were a big struggle, and the same issues on pricing still existed and it didn't seem like Supervalu gave Haggen much help or pricing support either.
I have two accounts and I play on another belonging to a friend that doesn't use theirs. You get to choose one of those high-value category coupons (meat, bakery, produce, paper goods, haba) each time you play through all the levels, which only takes a few days worth of free plays. After going through twice, you get an offer for a free 1 year of FreshPass too. I signed up for the hell of it but probably won't use anything other than the $5 monthly coupon.
