Albertsons Is Closing Stores and Cutting Hundreds of Jobs and Washington DC Has Been Setting This Up for 40 Years

Hundreds of grocery workers just found out they're losing their jobs.

The chain that employs them – Albertsons – is shutting down locations in California, Texas, and Washington DC after its proposed merger with Kroger collapsed last year.

Neither party in Washington wants to explain why this keeps happening.

The Closures

Albertsons — parent company of Safeway, Vons, and Pavilions — is closing stores nationwide as it scrambles to cut costs and survive in a grocery market it can no longer afford to compete in.

In Southern California, Vons stores in Escondido and Redlands are closing in April, eliminating 135 jobs. An Albertsons near Riverside closed in March, cutting 75 workers. A Safeway in Northern California closed earlier this year, affecting 76 employees.

The cuts reach beyond California. Two Albertsons stores in Tarrant County, Texas are closing by late April, costing 138 workers their livelihoods. A Safeway in Washington D.C. shuts down in May – 87 more positions gone.

The company had already closed roughly 20 stores in 2025.

"These store closure decisions were not made lightly and many associates at the impacted locations were placed in positions at other stores," an Albertsons spokesperson told Fox Business.

Albertsons stock is down 22% over the past year.

The Law That Used to Prevent This

Congress saw this exact problem coming in 1936 and passed the Robinson-Patman Act to stop it.

The problem wasn't new. By the 1920s and 1930s, grocery chains had grown large enough to bully their suppliers — demanding discounts unavailable to any competitor without the same purchasing volume. The A&P alone had ballooned to more than 15,000 locations by 1930. Federal regulators documented the damage: a 1934 FTC report found that the pricing leverage big chains extracted translated into cost advantages of as much as 35% over independent rivals in some markets. The smaller grocer wasn't less efficient. He was just smaller.

Robinson-Patman drew a line. Suppliers could still offer volume discounts where genuine economies of scale justified them — but they couldn't hand one buyer a price they'd never extend to a competitor of similar standing. For four decades it held. Through the postwar boom and into the 1970s, the FTC pursued the law aggressively — at its peak bringing more than 500 enforcement actions in a single four-year stretch.

Independent grocers held over half the market. Communities had options. Competition was real.

Then, in the early 1980s, the government stopped enforcing it.

How Washington Handed the Market to Walmart

What followed was predictable to anyone paying attention.

With the law sitting dormant, Walmart leveraged its size to extract supplier concessions its smaller rivals couldn't match. As Walmart's prices fell, independent grocers watched their wholesale costs rise – suppliers making up their losses somewhere. Community grocery stores began closing. Within two decades Walmart had become the nation's dominant food retailer – occupying the same position A&P had held before Robinson-Patman reined that chain in.

Here is the part nobody in Washington admits: Kroger was once in Walmart's shoes.

In the mid-20th century, Kroger was the large chain using its purchasing power to crowd out smaller rivals – exactly the dynamic Robinson-Patman was written to prevent. Enforcement constrained it. When enforcement stopped, Kroger and Safeway had no choice but to follow Walmart's lead – centralizing purchasing and embarking on merger waves just to survive the environment Walmart had created.

It's a simple cycle. Stop enforcing the rules against the biggest player, and every other player has to become as big as possible just to stay alive. Today, the top four grocery retailers capture nearly 60% of all grocery spending. Walmart alone controls roughly a quarter of the entire American grocery market.

Think about what Washington would never allow in sports. Imagine the NFL permitting teams to merge – the Cowboys absorbing the Eagles, the Patriots folding into the Giants. Nobody would call that good for fans. But that is precisely what four decades of merger permissiveness produced in American grocery – and in industry after industry – while Washington looked away.

The National Grocers Association has been warning about this for years. "Giant national chains and e-commerce behemoths wield their influence to set terms of trade in the grocery marketplace," the NGA states. "Dominant firms get lower prices, preferable terms, exclusive offerings, and priority access to high-demand products. Independent grocers find themselves unable to compete on a level playing field."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and a bipartisan group of senators urged the DOJ and FTC this year to start enforcing Robinson-Patman again. The law has sat essentially dormant for four decades.

Easy Money Finished the Job

Washington's second gift to corporate consolidation: nearly 14 years of zero interest rates.

From 2008 through 2022, the Federal Reserve held rates at or near zero – the longest period of artificially cheap borrowing in modern American history. Big companies with access to capital markets could borrow billions at negligible cost to fund acquisitions, expand operations, and absorb competitors. Walmart, Amazon, and Costco built market dominance on cheap debt that no independent grocer could access on the same terms.

The Cato Institute put it directly: the Fed's zero interest rate policy "redistributed wealth from Main Street to Wall Street." Both parties in Washington drove the deficit spending that made those low rates politically necessary for years on end. The biggest players closest to the money got cheaper capital, better supplier terms, and a regulatory environment that looked away while they bought up the competition.

Main Street grocers got food deserts.

What Comes Next

Albertsons is now betting its survival on digital sales and automation. Digital revenue rose 21% in its most recent quarter and loyalty membership reached 49.8 million customers. The company is replacing supply chain workers with AI and automated warehouse systems – the only cost lever left to a chain that couldn't achieve the scale it needed.

That may keep Albertsons alive. It will not bring back the Euless store, the Escondido Vons, or the D.C. Safeway – or the thousands of independent grocers who lost that fight decades before Albertsons did.

The workers losing those jobs didn't write the Robinson-Patman loopholes. They didn't set the Fed's interest rate policy. They didn't vote for 40 years of bipartisan spending that handed cheap capital to the biggest players and called it economic growth.

They stocked the shelves. And now Washington is surprised the shelves are closing.

Sources:

• Bradford Betz, "Major grocery chain closes more stores, cuts jobs as post-merger fallout deepens," Fox Business, April 2, 2026.
• "Albertsons to close two North Texas stores, cut 138 jobs, filings show," WFAA, March 2026.
• National Grocers Association, "Enforce the Robinson-Patman Act," nationalgrocers.org.
• "The Policy Shift That Decimated Local Grocery Stores," Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 2025.
• "It's time we have a national conversation about the Robinson-Patman Act," Food Navigator USA, April 2, 2026.
• "The Pitfalls of the Federal Reserve's Zero Interest Rate Policy," Cato Institute.