“Safeway and Albertsons don’t have much going for them other than their size. The main thing that saved both companies was to combine and grow together. As an investment, I’m not sure what the upside is.”-David Livingston, grocery store analyst
The San Jose Mercury News reporting that the merged Albertsons-Safeway filed layoff notices with state employment administrators, saying at least 8-hundred Californians are about to be laid off!
Also the new company will be called New Albertsons, and owners New York based Cerberus, and Idaho based AB Acquisitions, will issue new stocks (IPO, Initial Public Offering) by the end of the year.
A side note, at the end of last year AB Acquisitions revealed that “…its third party IT services provider SUPERVALU of a separate, more recent, attempted criminal intrusion seeking to obtain payment card information used in some of its stores………..may have captured account numbers, expiration date, other numerical information and/or the cardholder’s name.” This was separate from an earlier data breach, and involved “….Albertsons stores in Southern California, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming and Southern Utah were impacted. In addition, ACME Markets in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey; Jewel-Osco stores in Iowa, Illinois and Indiana; and Shaw’s and Star Markets stores in Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Rhode Island were affected by this new incident.”
Albertsons just made $33-million USD by selling off three stores, one in Palmdale, California, and two others in Oregon. The buyer is Spirit Realty Capital, the sale was mandated by the Federal Trade Commission as part of the merger of Albertsons and Safeway. No word on what Spirit Realty Capital will do with the three properties, which currently are home to active grocery stores.
Recently unAmerican and pro-British empire Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America took credit for Albertsons-Safeway’s gun ban. However, Beitbart showed that the grocery stores already had a gun ban in place by 2014, and implied that competitor Kroger’s pro-gun stance actually increased Kroger’s profits: “Safeway did not ban guns in response to a Moms Demand campaign. Rather, Safeway’s store policy has long prohibited guns….. …Safeway’s gun ban was in place during the third quarter of 2014, the very quarter in which Kroger’s profits jumped ’21 percent’ after they refused to ban guns.”