Her store wasn’t the only location that Haggen struggled to manage. She and dozens of her co-workers lost their jobs. It brings me back to a time I don’t like to remember.” “I think about how hard it was on my family. “Tensions with Haggen were at an all-time high,” Martinez said. Workers began getting paid every other week, instead of weekly. The company cut hours and laid off employees. Sales slowed and the company raised prices. Haggen overhauled the Valencia store and changed the branding and labels. Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Haggen went bankrupt soon after buying Albertsons and Safeway's divested stores. With the FTC’s blessing, Haggen, a small supermarket chain in the Northwest with just 18 locations, bought 146 of the former Albertsons and Safeway stores, including the one where Martinez worked. The companies’ divestiture plan addressed the FTC’s competition concerns in communities where the two chains had overlapping stores, which would have given the new company a dominant market share. To win approval for the deal from antitrust regulators, Albertsons and Safeway agreed to sell 168 of their stores to buyers approved by the Federal Trade Commission. We could depend on our paychecks.”īut things changed after Albertsons and Safeway joined together. The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing Tuesday afternoon to scrutinize the potential impact of the Kroger-Albertson merger.īack in 2014, Martinez was working for a subsidiary of Safeway in Valencia, California.”It was a really great company,” she said. Now the fallout from that troubled transaction hangs over this latest, even bigger merger proposal. That deal has since become a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when two supermarket giants merge. Martinez lost her job as a pharmacy technician in the aftermath of a prior supermarket mega-merger: Albertsons’ $9 billion tie-up with Safeway in 2014. When Christine Martinez found out last month that Kroger and Albertsons planned to merge in a deal worth nearly $25 billion, she thought, “here we go again.”
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