Albertsons Cutting Jobs At Boise Headquarters
Just weeks after its merger with Kroger was nixed by a federal court judge, Albertsons is cutting staff at its Boise, Id., headquarters.
According to a report from KBOI, the CBS television affiliate in Boise, the job cuts will impact employees in its corporate and division support officers. It appears that the reductions will not impact store personnel.
In a statement to KBOI, Albertsons said, “Our strategy to win and earn customers for life includes finding new sources of productivity to enable us to invest in growth. After many years of productivity efforts across several parts of our company, we recently turned our attention to our general and administrative expenses and made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our corporate and division workforce."
It was not immediately clear how many positions would be eliminated, but some of those positions may be moving outside the United States. Albertsons’ officials said the company has been on a “multi-year journey” to balance its onshore and offshore activities, having grown an offshore hub that is home to associates and contract workers supporting administrative operations.
News of the job cuts comes more than a month after the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger was blocked by a federal judge who agreed with the Federal Trade Commission’s view that the marriage of the two grocery giants would have a negative impact on competition in the traditional supermarket channel.
U.S District Court Judge Adrienne Nelson said in her ruling, “Evidence shows that defendants engage in substantial head-to-head competition and the proposed merger would remove that competition.”
A day after that decisions, Albertsons has filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit claiming, among other things, willful breach of contract.
Albertsons said Kroger “willfully breached the merger agreement in several key ways, including by repeatedly refusing to divest assets necessary for antitrust approval, ignoring regulators’ feedback, rejecting stronger divestiture buyers and failing to cooperate with Albertsons.”
A Kroger spokesperson called claims in the lawsuit “baseless and without merit.”
