Grocery Update #22: Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned As A Grocery Clerk.

Also: Really Important Disclosures From The FTC/Kroger Trial.

Discontents: 1. Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned As A Grocery Clerk. 2. American Economic Liberties Project’s Coverage of the FTC/Kroger Merger Trial. 3. Tunes

1. Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned As A Grocery Clerk.

I worked a lot of blue collar gigs in my teens and 20s. Construction, landscaping, stints as an urban farmer, dishwasher, grill cook, deli clerk, camp counselor for many summers (shout out to Bronx House JCC!), warehouse picker, EMT and ambulance driver, Belgian frites maker, flea market vendor, and community organizer-a couple times over. Nothing ever really stuck.

I only hit my stride when I worked in grocery stores. The physicality, along with the mental game, were right up my alley. Getting hired at a great time in the industry’s growth enabled me to learn the trade, build skills, make connections and move up and around. The community and friendships I made. The insane hours, the ridiculous demands and the frenetic pace of work. The food, obviously. I was very lucky and I took advantage of all the opportunities. The grocery industry made me the person I am today. Everything I needed to know, I learned as a grocery stock clerk.

How to move and lift.

At its heart, grocery is a physical job. You are lifting, turning, carrying, pushing, pulling boxes, gondolas, U-boats, carts, boxes, bags and pallet jacks every day. You have to learn how to use your body, how to be present in your body so that you are efficient, fast but not rushed, and so you don’t get hurt. Your fingers and hands become more dexterous. You learn not to strain too much. You learn to move ergonomically so that you don’t pull a muscle. Lift with your legs, not with your arched back. Brace the box against the shelving while using two hands to stock products from box to shelf. You move economically so you maximize the work done with the least energy expended, breaking down boxes while wrapping up plastic packaging, pushing a cart while picking up stray refuse, fronting and facing boxes and bags while watching date codes or talking shit with your shift mates. If you want to stay in one piece, you learn to move and lift.

How to merchandise.

Merchandising is a skill. You don’t automatically learn how to build a tightly organized, fully stocked endcap or put together a 40 foot run of 83 inch high profile, 6 level Madix shelving on a wobbly gondola. You learn. You get trained by veterans. Rick Valdez and Lisa Gargas in Texas. Brent King, aka King Brent, in Florida. Folks that had a heart of gold and took time to explain the why’s, the do’s and do not’s. That it was a process, not a goal. You learn to shimmy a nickel under the insert tab of a slightly bent Lozier shelf so it sits straight, even fully loaded with dozens of bottles of olive oil, gallon waters or laundry soap. You make sure the coasters hidden under the bottom shelving are level, and you show off to your friends, wife and kids how to level a rickety upright. They just think you are weird. You learn vertical facings or horizontal facings for displays. Color breaks, cross merchandising with adjacent products, how to follow a planogram or how to eyeball a full 4 foot set of glass bottles and plastic packages so it is visually appealing, shoppable and organized by price, by brand, by flavor, by color. Merchandising is a skill. It is also a basic function of human civilization, going back thousands of years to the public markets, the agoras, the tianguis, the fora, the souks, the mercados, the plazas. It is a wonderful thing, to dazzle the eyes and tempt the senses with a well-built display of food. Welcome to the legacy, merchandising, a skilled trade.

How to communicate.

Grocery retail is based on good communication. The truck is late and will impact shelf stock levels? Let customer service know. The frozen load came in out of temp and receiving refused it at the dock? Let the afternoon shift know. A pallet of milk tipped over and the overnight dairy clerk spent half a shift mopping milk out from the rear load dairy cooler? Likewise. They won’t be happy, they may get cranky with you, but better than being in the dark. Communication can be via shortwave walkie talkie, cell phone, Signal, Messenger, WhatsApp, landline, post-it notes, hand signs or shouting across the store (when there are no customers around). Communication must happen, and learning to do it clearly, effectively, diplomatically, in a timely manner, will make a huge difference in your work, life, your career, your relationships.

How to cooperate.

Grocery stores are fast paced, busy, high pressure workplaces. You have to keep up with the pace that customers, other stores, your teammates, the management all set. You know that if it is the holidays, you will be getting huge loads of product followed by huge waves of customers. But it isn’t a competition with your teammates. Sure, you can all motivate, browbeat, tease, even scold each other to work harder or faster, but if you really want to succeed, then you learn to cooperate. Communication is a big part of it. But is also about working together to tackle the biggest or most challenging tasks, like laying out and building a 3 pallet display of canned seltzers into a giant map of Texas, or breaking down and stocking out a load that came 4 hours late right during your busiest time of the day. It means dividing and conquering the work, some retail triage. Recognizing and playing to each other’s strengths and being patient with each other means you and your teammates will be more efficient, happier on the job and less prone to quit. What matters, day in, day out is how well you all work together, what gets done collectively with each contributing to the whole. Cooperation makes it happen.

How to advocate.

It is not easy to stand up for yourself and/or your coworkers when your job is barely paying the bills. Being in constant debt, not being able to make ends meet, your kids needing food, shelter, new clothes and shoes. It takes a lot to speak up when you see some bullshit at work. When I was working in Florida, two of my closest colleagues were fired. One of them didn’t have any money on them so the other, his team leader, bought him a bottle of water and used the employee discount to take 20% off the price. This 50 cent bottle of water got them both fired. It was against company policy to use an employee discount to buy other employees anything at the store. The team leader had been with the company 12 years. The other guy had just been a team member all-star and was well liked in the store. They only had 5 people on their whole team and now the manager and their best employee were sacked immediately. It was obviously insane. A bunch of us tried talking to the store manager who fired them, trying to get them to reverse the firing or just make it a suspension. We brought up plenty of examples of when company policy wasn’t being followed and folks weren’t fired. A couple of us even tried getting our coworkers to do a walkout. But there wasn’t much energy for that. The store manager didn’t budge, the company transferred two people from other stores to staff the department and my former colleagues moved on to other jobs.

I learned how expendable we all were, despite the company always blowing smoke about morale and retention. I also learned that I could suck up my fears and speak up, and get others to do so when they were impacted by unfair policies. Such advocacy goes all the way to getting better wages. When you and your coworkers collectively ask for better pay, better working conditions, better benefits, that is federally protected activity. The job of a citizen is to keep their mouth open.

How to fail.

In the grocery industry, everybody eventually falls short of their goals. You don’t get that truck unloaded before the customers start flooding in and you have to stock shelves in between baby carriages and Instacart nerds. You miss your sales targets and kiss goodbye to your quarterly bonus. You misread some code dates and have to spoil out a few cases of milk or yogurt, exceeding your shrink budget. You get a late truck, the delivery is out of temp and you end up undercounting your period ending inventory. Shit will always happen. Sometimes it is worse than others and can result in a write up, demotion or the worst case scenario, your ass gets canned. Most of the time it is just a valuable learning exercise. To paraphrase Miles Davis, everybody misses a note, but it’s the next note that counts. You just keep rolling and do your best the next time around.

How to just keep going.

Grocery is a marathon, not a sprint. You learn to preserve your energy for the long term. That could be an endless 8 hour overnight shift stocking out a 2,000 case load, a ridiculous, back to back “clo-pen” shift, a fiscal quarter or two where your store is negative comp’ing and your management is in a panic, or a holiday season where the trucks are always late, the eggs are cracked, the heavy cream is spoiled and the cinnamon is out of stock. It can and will happen. You understand how to pace yourself. You and your colleagues have to show support, empathy, solidarity under pressure. It's about stamina and endurance. Maintaining your health, your adrenals. When you can, exercise. Go for a walk. Take supplements, lots of Vitamin C. I learned about adrenal supplements from the folks I worked with, some pills sketchier than others. Watch a movie. Watch your blood glucose. We all have those times when we coast on coffee and alcohol, some even turn to harder stuff. We are all human, we have bills to pay, kids to support. Keeping up sometimes means burning out. But be kind to yourself too, do what you can to take care of yourself. Take all of your PTO. As soon as you get it. The kids will remember when you miss their birthday or recital but no one will remember that one week when you exceeded your sales plan by 15% or built that epic endcap that sold down within 3 hours. You realize that you need a support network at work, to look out for each other. It could be your union, or it could just be your shift mates. It doesn’t get easier. It’s probably going to get shittier, with more dollar stores opening up, more pandemics, mass shootings, bad weather, awful politicians that don’t care about grocery clerks or how food makes it into their shopping carts. People need to eat, so we figure out how to keep going.

How to understand the biz.

The grocery business is big. $1 trillion a year. Very complicated. Highly consolidated. Thousands of stores. Tens of thousands of products. Each with their own costs, margins, distributors, retail prices, ingredients, sizes, packaging, pack sizes, case packs, tie-hi’s on a pallet, delivery schedules, lead times, etc. It is really nuts. The fact that it is also a for-profit business, mostly monopolized by large scale corporations accountable to shareholders and faraway owners, with sales and margin targets that get crazier every quarter, so you have to work harder and faster. It is a lot. You learn to do basic math in your head. Which wholesaler your products come from and when they get delivered. How your customers shop, what they want and what drives them away or gets them coming back for more. Retail is a not a new art or science. Commerce and merchandising go way back in human civilization, way before Late Stage Capitalism gutted the retail sector. The basic functions of a grocery clerk are not capitalism per se, even though in the current context, they are essential to the functioning of capitalism, e.g., an economic system run by people with the most capital (capital being the stuff they take to the bank that takes on a life of its own after most of us spend our lives working to produce it. Yes, that is a lot of swallow. But Dolly Parton said it best.).

The basic job functions of a grocery clerk enable the industry to function, from what products get on shelf, what prices they sell for, what gets discontinued and what is spoiled out. All that product stocked on shelves, all that food that goes out through the registers, it doesn’t take complex math to understand how much money is transacted in the grocery business, and that you and your coworkers are getting a pretty small share. A grocery stock crew takes home about 4-5 cents of every dollar it produces. Over 95% of the revenue is going elsewhere: to overhead, to management, to shareholders. Of course it doesn’t seem that way when you are toiling away in the belly of the beast, churning out 75-100 cases an hour so you don’t get canned.

When I came into the biz, I asked one of my team leaders why he was working in grocery. He said, with all sincerity, “To feed the people.” He meant it. I saw the shit he dealt with from store managers, customers and vendors. But he knew the work was essential. So take a breath. None of it happens without the grocery clerks. There is no grocery business without the folks loading trucks, stocking shelves, breaking down boxes, building the sets, inventorying backstock and keeping those boxcutters sharp. That is the most important thing I needed to know from my time as a grocery clerk.

2. American Economic Liberties Project: Coverage of the FTC Kroger Merger Trial.

The American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) has been covering the FTC Kroger merger trial and reviewing transcripts. They have published an essential round up of findings from the proceedings. Back in March, they produced this great fact sheet busting a lot of the myths and propaganda being peddled about the merger, much of which coincides with what I wrote in Forbes almost 2 years ago. As we published in The Grocery Update last month, Kroger dominates many metro area grocery markets in the U.S.. They had sky high profits this past fiscal quarter. The merger will further concentrate economic power and wealth accumulation in the already too-consolidated grocery sector, led by Walmart. Kroger and Albertsons have already spent nearly $900 million on lawyers, talking heads and consultants to push the merger through, money that could have been invested in lower consumer prices or higher employee wages. And much of what they have put out in the trade media is pretty silly, and debunked via their sworn testimony. Enough is enough.

Big Grocery Update shoutout to Laurel Kilgour, Research Manager at the American Economic Liberties Project for her diligence and consistency in this reportage, especially on Twitter/X. Unfortunately, grocery trade media coverage has been less than stellar in publishing much of this info below. But they are at least starting to see the merger for what it is: a fiasco and a bad idea.

So here are excerpts/highlights via Laurel Kilgour and AELP:

• Kroger executives admitted to price-gouging during the pandemic. Kroger admitted on the stand that they deliberately hiked prices on everyday essentials such as milk and eggs above cost increases from inflation. This price-gouging generated record profits.

• After previous mergers, Kroger and Albertsons never made promised investments in lowering prices. To appease worried customers, Kroger has pledged to invest $1 billion in lowering prices at Albertsons following this merger. But economics and finance expert Aaron Yeater testified that following Kroger’s 2014-15 acquisitions of Harris Teeter and Roundy’s, “promised or expected price investments had not been made.”

• The merger is motivated by paydays for corporate executives and private equity barons. Albertsons CEO and COO testified that they will each receive tens of millions of dollars in golden parachutes if the deal goes through. The COO also testified that a private equity firm on Albertsons’ board pushed Albertsons to put itself up for sale, and will receive massive payouts from any deal.

• Kroger and Albertsons are “primary” competitors with each other and charge more in areas without strong competition. Kroger and Albertsons hold significant market shares in numerous regions across the United States… They price-check each other on everyday essentials far more frequently than any other grocery store.

• The competitive intensity between these giant chains is also reflected by Kroger’s choice not to end their price-gouging when their own costs decreased, or even a month after Walmart lowered its prices. Instead, Kroger waited until Albertsons lowered its prices to finally ease off its price-gouging. Kroger looks to Albertsons for a “price ceiling.”

• On cross-examination, Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen admitted that Albertsons is Kroger’s number one or number two competitor in 14 out of 17 major metro areas.

• Kroger executive Andrew Groff also admitted that Kroger charged higher prices in what it called a “no-comp[etition] or low-comp[etition] zone in Western Colorado.”

• This testimony confirms that Kroger and Albertsons are head-to-head competitors and that combining these two giants into one would increase prices for consumers in regions where these corporations compete.

• Union leaders testified that competition is essential for good jobs. A merged company means decreased mobility in the job market... Multiple union leaders testified that in order for strikes to provide effective leverage in negotiating good union contracts, employers must fear losing business to competitors and unions need to be able to direct customers to shop at other (preferably unionized) stores for the duration of the strike. Jon McPherson, Vice President of Associate and Labor Relations at Kroger testified that Albertsons is the only employer in the country that Kroger does multi-employer bargaining with and the only employer in the country Kroger does coordinated employer bargaining with. Unions play these two employers against each other when negotiating contracts. So if these two supermarket giants merge, unions lose a powerful tool to ensure strong collective bargaining agreements.

• Kroger and Albertsons do not need to “merge to compete” with Walmart or any other grocer. Such arguments are nothing more than sleight of hand. Pro-merger talking points cite national aggregate figures, ignoring that most grocery shopping is local; Kroger’s own securities filings acknowledge that most people do their weekly shopping at a store within a 2 to 2.5 mile radius from home. Reporting indicates that Kroger or Albertsons banners have higher market shares than Walmart in many regions, including Northern California, Detroit, Arizona, and more. According to Albertsons’ own annual report, it is “No. 1 or No. 2 by market share in 70 percent of the [metro regions] in which it operates.”…

• Corporate promises about speculative merger benefits are not legally binding– and are especially untrustworthy coming from Albertsons’ CEO, who admitted destroying evidence. Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen admitted on the stand that promises about the deal’s benefits for the public are not legally enforceable, and specifically admitted that the merged Kroger/Albertsons could change their mind and close stores at any time after the deal goes through.

• Albertsons has a track record of broken promises resulting in store closures and worker layoffs. Kroger and Albertsons are attempting to skirt scrutiny by pledging to keep stores open and divest stores to keep the market competitive. But a previous divestment attempt led to the failure of dozens of stores. When Albertsons acquired Safeway, in order to get the deal through some stores were divested to a third party buyer Comvest Partners– just like Kroger and Albertsons both plan to divest 579 stores to third party buyer C&S in this deal. Andrea Zinder, President of UFCW Local 324 in Southern California, testified that the union trusted assurances that Haggen (a chain owned by Comvest) would be a good operator and told senior workers to give them a chance. But instead, within six months Haggen declared bankruptcy and many stores were closed, so those workers lost their jobs and communities lost shopping options. The remaining stores were sold back to Albertsons for pennies on the dollar.

• Hundreds of stores are at an increased risk of closing if this merger goes through due to a divestiture package that is designed to fail…

• But instead of leveraging their operational expertise to ensure good outcomes, both the CEO of Kroger Rodney McMullen and the CEO of Albertsons Vivek Sankaran testified that they had no involvement in designing the divestiture package, which affects 579 stores. Meanwhile, C&S Senior VP of corporate development and financial planning Alona Florenz testified that Kroger was giving C&S its “worst chains.”

• Despite scaremongering by Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran that Albertsons would have to resort to store closures if the merger does not go through, he testified that Albertsons financially sound and actually has not identified any specific stores for closure. This follows previous sworn testimony to courts and Congress that Albertsons was in “excellent” financial condition in order to justify a debt-fueled $4 billion special dividend to private equity investors.

• The real risk of store closures is if the merger does go through, due to a badly designed divestiture package that appears to be stacked with weaker stores that are not receiving the private label brands or IT and analytics services they would need to viable compete with a combined Kroger/Albertsons. This divestiture package may instead be designed to satisfy other motivations behind investments by C&S’s owners and Softbank.

About AELP:

The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.

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3. Tunes.

Obviously.

peace.