Kroger to close at least two Virginia stores in profitability move

At least two Virginia Kroger stores will be among the 60 locations the Cincinnati, Ohio-based company plans to shutter over the next 18 months to improve efficiency and profitability.

Kroger announced the plan during a corporate earnings call Friday. The company hasn’t said which stores it plans to close, but said the closures will happen around the country. It also said employees at impacted stores will be offered jobs at other locations.

On June 20, Kroger filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN), which was posted Tuesday afternoon by Virginia Works, the state’s department of workforce development and advancement. The filing  said 81 employees will lose their jobs by Aug. 22 due to the store at 1904 Emmet St. N in Charlottesville closing.

A news release distributed Friday by United Food & Commercial Workers Local 400, which represents 35,000 members in grocery, retail, cannabis, health care, food processing, service and other industries in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, noted that in addition to the Charlottesville store, another Virginia Kroger, a location at 466 S. Cummings St. in Abingdon, will close Sept. 19. Virginia Works had not yet posted a WARN notice about employees at that store as of Thursday, but Mike Cochran, Abingdon’s town manager, said he was notified Friday that the store is closing. 

“We also have a Food Lion and Food Country in town, about a mile from this location, plus the Food City store, so there will still be choices for the customers,” he wrote in an email. “That Kroger has a lot of customers that are very local to it and many are elderly so this will be a change for them.”

A spokesperson for the city of Charlottesville declined to comment on the Emmet Street store closing.

“We see this as an opportunity to move these closed store sales to other stores, and we think that should improve profitability,” Ronald Sargent, Kroger’s interim chairman and CEO, said during Friday’s call.

Sargent also said Kroger plans to open at least 30 stores this year and will accelerate its store openings in “high-growth geographies” next year.

Kroger is the nation’s largest supermarket chain, with 2,731 stores in 35 states and Washington, D.C. It operates stores under multiple brand names, including Smith’s, Ralphs, King Soopers and Fred Meyer.

Sargent said Kroger usually evaluates the performance of individual stores on an annual basis, but it deferred any store closings during its two-year effort to merge with rival Albertsons. The two companies announced the $24.6 billion merger plan in 2022, but the deal fell apart late last year after two judges blocked it due to concerns about competition.

Kroger did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Mark Federici, president of UFCW Local 400, stated in a news release distributed Friday that the Kroger closings will limit food access for the communities where the stores are located.

“Instead of investing billions of dollars in buying its own stock and paying legal fees for a doomed merger with Albertsons, plus millions more in compensation for corporate executives, Kroger needs to invest in better compensation for associates, better staffing in stores and making store improvements to better serve their customers,” Federici said in a statement.

Federici added that the union plans to support impacted workers and suggested that Kroger’s offer to move workers to different stores falls short.  “For many workers, the reality is these stores are too far from one another for a transfer to be practicable,” he said in a statement.