I'm in Albuquerque. 3/4 of all supermarkets are either Albertson's or Smith's (Kroger). It will be a massive hit to local grocery competition. Prices will absolutely go up.
Maybe. It would be nice.
But with one national company having that much market share, they could easily cut prices below cost for 6 months, forcing the locals to close.
Where I am in California there are six Safeways (owned by Albertsons who is merging Kroger) in a two mile square. At least here, we aren't short of grocery stores, and these aren't being shuttered anyway, they're being sold to C&S Wholesale Grocers . The issue is this massive monopoly, not really being mitigated by the anti trust regulators making them give up a tiny percentage of their kingdom in order to vastly increase their strangle hold on US grocery stores and ability to artificially inflate food prices.
Seen this happen before. They'll "close" these stores then a buddy company "buys" them, setup shop, inevitably fails, and they get bought up again by the same original company.
No more supermarket mega mergers! These create bigger food deserts in already undeserved areas
I sure hope this doesn't go through. Albertsons is already too big, their regular prices are high, although their sale prices are okay, they make their customers jump through hoops to get those sale prices. I miss Lucky.