PORTLAND, Ore. — Safeway parent company Albertsons and Fred Meyer parent company Kroger on Tuesday released the full list of 579 stores that they propose to sell off in an attempt to win approval from federal regulators who have moved to block a planned merger of the two grocery giants due to antitrust concerns.
The list includes a total of 186 Safeway, Albertsons, QFC and Haggen stores in Oregon and Washington, including many in the Portland metro area and the Puget Sound region. They would all be sold to New Hampshire-based C&S Wholesale Grocers under the terms of the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger deal.
RELATED: Dozens of Safeway, Albertsons, QFC stores in Oregon would be sold off under Kroger-Albertsons merger
It's still far from clear if the merger will be allowed to proceed, but Google Trends data on Wednesday shows that the release of the list is prompting a flurry of search questions from Portland users, with many people wanting to know more about details such as who currently owns Safeway, who would acquire the divested stores and whether they would be renamed.
Here are five answers we can VERIFY:
THE SOURCES
WHAT WE FOUND
WHO CURRENTLY OWNS SAFEWAY?
Answer: Safeway is owned by Albertsons, which in turn is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.
Cerberus acquired Albertsons in 2006, according to Forbes, and Albertsons later acquired Safeway in 2015. Albertsons also owns a number of smaller regional grocery store brands such as Haggen in Washington and Vons in California.
Including all of its subsidiary brands, Albertsons is the fourth-biggest grocery retailer in the United States after Walmart, Kroger and Costco, according to FoodIndustry.Com. It operates about 2,250 stores nationwide, a little less than half of which are Safeway stores acquired in the 2015 merger that still operate under the Safeway brand name.
WHO OWNS KROGER?
Answer: Kroger is not a subsidiary of any other company.
Kroger is the parent company of a large number of grocery store chains including Fred Meyer, QFC, Food 4 Less, Ralphs, Harris Teeter and Smith's. It also operates 1,240 stores under its own Kroger brand name, mostly in the South and Midwest.
Kroger operates 2,750 stores in total and is the second-largest grocery retailer in the United States after Walmart, according to FoodIndustry.Com. Some rankings list Kroger as the biggest U.S. grocery retailer because they exclude retailers like Walmart or Target that tend to be categorized as big-box stores rather than grocery stores.
But regardless of whether it counts as a grocery store company, Walmart is indisputably the biggest grocery seller in America, and its dominance is part of what's fueling the Kroger and Albertsons merger; the two companies claim they need to combine in order to stay competitive with Walmart and Amazon, according to the Associated Press.
WHO IS C&S WHOLESALE GROCERS?
Answer: C&S Wholesale Grocers is a Northeast company that started out as a wholesale supplier to grocery stores but now also operates its own stores through subsidiary brands.
The company's wholesale operations extend nationwide, but its footprint for brick-and-mortar grocery stores is far smaller than that of Albertsons or Kroger.
If the deal goes through, the 579 stores that C&S would acquire would more than triple the size of its grocery store portfolio and would put it in charge of hundreds of grocery stores up and down the West Coast, where it currently has essentially no retail presence.
WHAT IS PIGGLY WIGGLY?
Answer: Piggly Wiggly is a C&S grocery store brand that mainly operates in the South and Midwest.
It's the largest of several retail grocery store brands in the C&S portfolio, all of which are likely to be unfamiliar to Pacific Northwest shoppers; others include Grand Union and Southern Family Markets.
Piggly Wiggly is owned by C&S, but most Piggly Wiggly stores are franchises operated by affiliates. C&S acquired the Piggly Wiggly brand in 2003 and a franchise called Piggly Wiggly Carolina in 2014, but the wholesaler dates the start of its current expansion into brick-and-mortar grocery stores to 2021, when it acquired another franchise called Piggly Wiggly Midwest that included a handful of corporate-owned stores.
ARE THE SOLD OFF OREGON STORES GOING TO BE RENAMED?
Answer: Unknown.
C&S's announcement of the deal mentions that the wholesaler will gain "exclusive licensing rights" to the Albertsons brand name in California, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming, which suggests an intent to keep using the current names in those states — but it doesn't say anything about the Oregon and Washington stores.
So, could Oregon Safeway shoppers find themselves shopping at a Piggly Wiggly? Again, unknown — but it's worth noting that the latest divestment proposal also includes Albertsons's Haggen brand and Kroger's QFC brand, along with the Oregon and Washington stores that the two companies operate under those brand names. So if C&S did opt to rename its new stores, it would have two options that are more familiar to Pacific Northwest shoppers.
The most recent historical example points to a rebrand; When Albertsons bought Safeway in 2015, the two chains sold off about 150 West Coast stores to Haggen, which was independent at the time and renamed them all. The rebrand was part of the deal; federal regulators wanted the expanded Haggen chain to directly compete with Albertsons in the West Coast market (it didn't work).
But again, at this point C&S has given no direct indication about what it plans to do if the deal goes through and it acquires the stores.