Shannon Corrick: Albertsons’ and Kroger’s greed is going to hurt workers and shoppers

By Shannon Corrick

You might have read recently that some hotshots in the corporate offices of Kroger and Albertsons figured out a way to take a fast $4 billion and harm the rest of us. Here’s why I think that’s a bad idea.

I am a grocery store worker at the local Albertsons/Safeway store No. 1740. I have worked here since 2016 and was essential long before the pandemic made it a cliché catchphrase. But after I spent the first few months of the pandemic holding down the fort and shouldering the surge of shoppers so families in our neighborhood could keep fed, how did my employer pay me back?

It decided out of the blue in May 2020 to cut my pay and the pay of hundreds of thousands of grocery store workers like me all across America. That was not right.

When our governor and local public health professionals were requiring that our stores reduce the crowds to better safeguard the health of shoppers and workers alike, the corporate management allowed the crowds in far above the limits.

That threatened the health of me and my family and shoppers, too. That was not right.

When union grocery store workers like me who work at Kroger stores in Colorado were trying to negotiate reasonable improvements in their contracts last year, Kroger, which had become rich off our labor, was so resistant to compromise that workers had no choice but to go on a 10-day strike until Kroger came back with a reasonable resolution. Then instead of learning from that, the company tried the same tricks in Southern California and up here in Washington. The only way we were able to pressure them to act differently and treat us workers a little better was through a coordinated, collective union action and negotiations and leveraging one company against the other. That kind of leverage for workers goes away when the No. 1 grocery in the nation buys my employer – the No. 2. That’s not right.

Now it seems like these giant grocery corporations are not happy with just having made billions of extra in profit on our backs as hard-working, low-paid workers.

Seems like they are not happy with just taking billions more in revenue from shoppers while these same shoppers are facing higher costs – higher costs that the companies blame as the result of inflation. But if inflation is really the thing driving up food prices, it seems to me that we’d be better off making sure that at least these two big chains stick around instead of letting them merge.

I’m no economist, but I know something about grocery store prices. I see them go up and down and all around every week as we make price changes each Tuesday night in our store. And I know that other grocery store workers over at a Kroger store are doing the same exact thing every week. But if a merger were to go through, we all know the prices will go one way – up. And that’s not right.

So let me wrap this up here.

As a grocery store employee, I have fears that we will lose our jobs if a merger happens.

I have fears that a merger will hurt our customers, too, with higher prices and reduced competition. That’s not only here in Cheney. It’s a reality that would hit communities hard from Denver to Los Angeles and all around Washington state. I, for one, stand together with the hundreds of thousands of grocery store workers and millions of shoppers who would be impacted and say – “not so fast.” Let’s protect our stores, protect our shoppers, protect our jobs and our communities.

Shannon Corrick has worked as a grocery store clerk with Safeway in Cheney since 2016 and is an executive board member and a Shop Steward in her union UFCW 3000 – the largest union in Washington state. UFCW 3000 represents workers in grocery stores, health care, retail, cannabis, food processing and other industries.