Shoppers come and go from Fred Meyer and Carrs stores that face each other across the Seward Highway in Midtown Anchorage on Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024. The parent companies of the competing businesses, Kroger and Albertsons, want to merge. where a Fred Meyer store competes directly with a Carrs or a Safeway, so the proposal for one parent company to buy the other for $24.6 billion has a lot of Alaska consumers worried.
The idea is if Kroger and Albertsons merge, they’ll be in better shape to compete with even bigger retailers, like Costco and Walmart, as well as, like dollar stores that now sell groceries and even Amazon. Bigger scale means bigger efficiencies, and that’s where the upside is supposed to come from. Federal regulators are wary of mergers because they can be anticompetitive, concentrating too much market power and hurting regular shoppers. To try to win regulators’ approval, Kroger and Albertsons say they’re prepared to sell off all 15 of the Carrs and Safeway stores in those Alaska communities, plus three more in Girdwood, Kenai and North Pole, to a company calledAgain, McMullen says these divested stores won’t close, because C&S is committed to running them as they are today.
“It’s a huge issue for Alaskans that resonates. It’s not a political issue, it’s a pocketbook issue,” said Veri di Suvero, executive director of the Alaska Public Interest Research Group, a statewide consumer advocacy nonprofit that. “Whether or not it’s in good faith, about these spinoffs, we’ve seen over and over again that they don’t work.”