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Tag: Southern California

Bullies At The Table: Consequences of Understaffing by Kroger and Albertsons

May 7, 2025 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 38, UFCW Local 3000, UFCW Local 324, UFCW Local 7, UFCW Local 770

Neglected Grocery Stores Going to the grocery store is shoppers least enjoyable retail experience because of long lines, high prices and limited availability of popular items. Most grocery workers in California, Colorado and Washington say that product sits in their stores’ backrooms because there is not enough staff to stock store shelves and that their stores are unable to provide good customer service. 

Photograph courtesy of © The Los Angeles City College (LACC) Foundation's "Food for Thought Program." "LACC has launched a Pop-Up Food Pantry to provide free nutritional assistance to our students in need." Photographer and usage license unknown

The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Eat the Last Sweet Bite of Grocery Store Competition: The deal between Albertsons and Kroger would trigger store closures, job losses and cost increases for consumers

November 14, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming and Judy Wood / Economic Roundtable

Grocery bills are skyrocketing while the essential workers who stock shelves or put out fresh produce face homelessness and hunger because they are chronically underpaid. A proposed merger between the nation’s two largest grocery corporations, Albertsons and Kroger, threatens to make a bad situation even worse. 

Image of painting by artist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), "Still life with fruit basket," painted between 1888-1890, oil on canvas. Original work in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer.

Hungry at the Table: White Paper on Grocery Workers at the Kroger Company

January 11, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming, Peter Dreier, Patrick Burns and Aaron Danielson / United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 324, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770

A multi-state survey of Over 37,000 Kroger grocery store employees finds 78% food insecure and 14% homeless

Photograph by Luis Felipe Salas, "Poverty." Photograph uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on October 15, 2009, taken on October 2, 2009. Protected under the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED license. The Economic Roundtable has not changed the image, and does not imply that the licensor endorses our use. The Economic Roundtable is not using the material for commercial purposes, and is not redistributing a modified, remixed, transformed, or built upon version of the material.

Poverty, Inequality and Justice

March 23, 2006 / By Daniel Flaming / Economic Roundtable

The survival of a city depends on at least three things: people who are willing to live and work together, a reasonably healthy economy, and an effectively organized government. This paper discusses the health of LA's economy, how it got the way it is, and what can be done about it.

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