Kroger to lay off thousands of corporate workers
About 3,000 jobs over three years equal 37 percent of head office, AI memo lands weeks before Ohio midterms defined by the economy
Images
newsweek.com
The Kroger Building is seen from the Carew Tower observatory deck in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 22, 2017.
newsweek.com
Kroger, the largest traditional supermarket chain in the United States, has told staff it will eliminate about 3,000 corporate jobs over the next three years, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters and Bloomberg. The cuts equal roughly 37 percent of the company's 8,200 corporate employees, at a business that reported $148 billion in revenue last year.
The memo, from chief executive Greg Foran, also sets out his desire to push artificial intelligence further into Kroger's operations. The positions being eliminated are desk jobs — the head office rather than the stores — at the very moment both of America's parties are campaigning on the price of what the stores sell.
The announcement lands in Ohio, where Kroger is the largest company in Greater Cincinnati and the corporate headquarters is expected to absorb a heavy share of the cuts, though they will not be limited to that city. The state votes in November in races both parties have built around affordability. Sherrod Brown, the former Democratic senator, is challenging Republican incumbent Jon Husted in a contest that could help decide the Senate: Republicans hold a 53-47 majority, and Democrats need to flip four seats to take the chamber. The governor's race between Democrat Amy Acton and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy is rated a toss-up.
The voters being courted are not optimistic. In a New York Times/Siena College poll of 616 Ohio voters conducted between September 22 and October 1, only 31 percent rated the state's economy good or excellent; 44 percent called it fair and 25 percent poor. Nationwide, the cost of living, tariffs and petrol prices during the Iran war have set the midterm agenda.
Ohio has been here before. A centre of steel, iron and automotive manufacturing for much of the twentieth century, it has spent decades absorbing factory closures, automation and deindustrialisation, and it has shifted from backing Barack Obama to handing Donald Trump double-digit victories. The candidates now promising households relief are campaigning in a state whose largest company is trimming its head office.
Kroger has not said how many of the eliminated positions are in Ohio.