Open Letter to Colorado Attorney General Weiser:
Please stop the Kroger Cartel.
Thank you for your time. I am extremely grateful that you have decided to fight against the merger of Kroger and Albertson’s for the People of Colorado.
I know that using the term “Cartel” may seem harsh, considering Kroger is marketed as one of the largest grocery stores in the country with over 2,000 stores nationwide ranging from full grocery to convenience stores.
We started calling them the Kroger Cartel in my family, last year, when groceries for a family of four went from $400 to $1200 month and, while researching this phenomena (in which our groceries became the second highest expenditure in my family other than our mortgage) we came upon the story of record profits (see: NOT inflation), opioid epidemic settlements, and lobbying programs to expand SNAP on behalf of the Kroger conglomerate, which owns City Market, King Soopers, and other recognizable stores.
At the same time I was coming across a $1.4 Billion settlement for Kroger’s role in spreading the opioid epidemic and having record profits, I was also watching them complain of high theft and the need to harass working families and elderly ladies while checking out from stores that wouldn’t exist without customers bringing in a whopping $33 Billion a year in gross profits for this company — a company which has the same GDP as a El Salvador, a country with a middle-sized economy.
Never mind that raising prices on everything in their store so they can have record profits for their merger may have directly contributed to more theft.
While they made it impossible to spend less than $30 every time I went to the grocery store, I also had the privilege of being told their merger with Albertson’s — the largest merger in grocery store history — was necessary so they could compete with Walmart. The $25 Billion merger has employees and regulators speaking out due to the company’s nefarious actions in recent years.
Nobody can compete with Walmart. The SNAP Program alone makes this impossible, with over $100 billion spent on SNAP every year, and Walmart taking an astounding 25% ($25 billion) of that pie every year. This is nearly the entire gross of Kroger’s yearly profits, so nobody else besides Amazon stands any chance of competition, making Kroger’s reasoning for this merger ridiculous on its face.
By comparison, Kroger takes in approximately $8 Billion of those SNAP Program funds and turns around and uses only $250,000,000 to lobby for expanding SNAP eligibility and to grease the wheels in Washington for the approval of this merger. Don’t worry, grannies and families, you could be eligible for SNAP one day, but until then, your grocery prices can have a 15% increase in price explicitly and directly related to SNAP Program expansion. Why? Because a company that makes astounding billions like Walmart ($155B) or Kroger ($33B) can easily just raise the prices because it is supplemented by billions in government funds, artificially inflating demand.
Hold on! There is a light at the end of this tunnel for the average American that has to spend $25 to make spaghetti and meatballs. Yes, the Kroger Cartel (who has, coincidentally, had no human being held responsible for dealing an immense amount of drugs that caused an epidemic of overdoses) seriously promises that once their giant merger happens, they will lower prices and stop making record profits off of hardworking and retired people. They will finally lower their prices on their food once we allow them to become a monopolistic grocery store. Once the grocery store gains complete control over the market, minus their competitors Walmart and Amazon (who make 5x as much as Kroger and Albertson’s combined) they’ll finally let their customers breathe and stop targeting them for the questionable weight of a bottle of sprinkles they were trying to buy but the alarm keeps going off on the self-checkout, and they’ve had to call the cashier over 3 times just to buy it…
…Sigh, but I digress.
Sooner or later the companies — that target our families with junk food, addictive prescription medications, high prices for everyday items, and make us feel like a thief for supporting them — will, totally, lower their prices once they have complete control of the market.
Lest we forget, those people who are purchasing the food with SNAP funds are also the same people working for Kroger, as Executives have known since 2018 that 27% or more of their employees are so grossly underpaid that they are homeless and below the poverty line, in need of the very same government assistance they lobby to expand and then raise prices because of the expansion.
Sometimes I just sit back and wonder at the amazing things $8 billion in SNAP funds can do for a company that doesn’t want to pay their employees, doesn’t want to help community hunger by keeping prices low (but asks you to donate at the check out), sells drugs nefariously without anyone seeing jail time, and treats the people who frequent their stores like thieves.
But who am I? Just a woman with 36 bottles of water on the bottom rack of my cart.
Please, don’t let Kroger hurt me, because I’m against this merger…
Rachel Suh lives in Pagosa Springs, and is a Certified SCRUM Master and Strategic Consultant working in facilitation, mentoring, training, and coaching. She has a passionate hobby of Political Activism.