Albertsons' Intermountain and Denver divisions to merge

[marketreportblog]

Albertsons Companies is combining the Intermountain and Denver divisions. An executive from Seattle will lead the new division. At the same time, they're consolidating regions into East, West, and California.
https://boisedev.com/news/2025/02/05/al ... alighment/

[pseudo3d]

That actually makes a lot of sense. Hopefully Intermountain gives new life to the Denver stores instead of the Denver division poisoning the Intermountain stores.

Fingers crossed.

[storewanderer]

Intermountain was around 100 stores and Denver was at around 140 stores I think. So on paper it makes sense to merge these two divisions.

From a competitive standpoint I am not sure Intermountain which has higher pricing and weaker ads than Denver, is going to shoot new life into Denver Division.

Intermountain does not do much competing with Kroger other than Fred Meyer. Denver is in intense competition with Kroger but flounders badly in too many head to head Kroger situations.

I'd have rather seen Intermountain launch an effort to develop a few new stores a year around Salt Lake City and take the Reno Stores over from NorCal and St. George Stores over from Southwest. Basically rebuild the pre-2004 Intermountain Division back to what it once was with Reno and Salt Lake included.

But obviously with the management retirements they made the decision that this was the right time to do this to Denver so we will see what happens.

I think this makes Denver even more ripe for some new competitor to enter. I do not see this as a move that will make the Denver Safeway operation stronger...

Intermountain was also the only Division out west that was majority Albertsons Stores. This now makes the combined Denver+Intermountain majority Safeway Stores.

[pseudo3d]

Intermountain was also the only Division out west that was majority Albertsons Stores. This now makes the combined Denver+Intermountain majority Safeway Stores.

Do the Albertsons-rebranded-as-Safeway stores in Denver actually do good business as Safeway? Maybe it's time to flip some (all?) back to Albertsons.

[storewanderer]

Intermountain was also the only Division out west that was majority Albertsons Stores. This now makes the combined Denver+Intermountain majority Safeway Stores.

Do the Albertsons-rebranded-as-Safeway stores in Denver actually do good business as Safeway? Maybe it's time to flip some (all?) back to Albertsons.

Not really. Slow traffic stores as Albertsons and just as slow under Safeway around Denver. Especially the Littleton and Aurora ones. Maybe some small bump in business in Colorado Springs though.

I don't think they'll rebrand anything else in Colorado...

I've never seen a chain try to run the same division in Boise as Denver. These are really different markets... but Safeway has handled Denver so poorly and this goes back 20+ years... they don't really have much to lose.

[ClownLoach]

So when are we going to talk about NorCal and SoCal becoming one? If the NorCal people are in charge, it is going to be very ugly in SoCal...

[storewanderer]

So when are we going to talk about NorCal and SoCal becoming one? If the NorCal people are in charge, it is going to be very ugly in SoCal...

The old Albertsons was going to merge NorCal and SoCal with SoCal being the controlling division. This was probably around 2004 or 2005.

I'm not sure what happened but it never happened.

The only thing that happened was they moved Reno from Intermountain to Northern California, supposedly in an effort to make Northern California turn a profit. That was right as Wal Mart was rolling Supercenters out heavily around Reno. Albertsons Intermountain ran a very aggressive price comp program against one of the Wal Mart openings which coincided with their SavOn combo initiative, in this particular location they had a freestanding SavOn next door and closed it to move into the Albertsons, put two of their strongest store directors in that store, and actually grew traffic at that store despite the Wal Mart opening. Profit obviously fell but they stayed busy. They had some other locations with huge traffic and profit drops due to Wal Mart openings and this was a test to do something different. NorCal took over and quickly reversed the pricing initiatives on the food side, they were so clueless, moved the managers around, but on the SavOn side, which was under Drug Region, the price initiatives stayed but had zero marketing, until LLC took over then those got reversed when they removed the SavOn combo program. It was sort of strange.

[arizonaguy]

So when are we going to talk about NorCal and SoCal becoming one? If the NorCal people are in charge, it is going to be very ugly in SoCal...

I think the 2 divisions will remain separate but that they'll be grouped into the California "region" as far as the organizational chart goes.

I believe currently Southern California is in a different "region" than Northern California.

[ClownLoach]

So when are we going to talk about NorCal and SoCal becoming one? If the NorCal people are in charge, it is going to be very ugly in SoCal...

I think the 2 divisions will remain separate but that they'll be grouped into the California "region" as far as the organizational chart goes.

I believe currently Southern California is in a different "region" than Northern California.

I don't think so. Changes like this are to eliminate layers of management to cut costs, reduce some big divisional president and regional vice president positions along with their teams. It would not be that different from other retailers to have each region, division, whatever be 600 to 700 stores which would mean California is all one. So you take the entire company down to only 3 regions each with its own President and the field team (District, HR, LP etc) reports to them. Saves many millions of dollars.

[storewanderer]

So when are we going to talk about NorCal and SoCal becoming one? If the NorCal people are in charge, it is going to be very ugly in SoCal...

I think the 2 divisions will remain separate but that they'll be grouped into the California "region" as far as the organizational chart goes.

I believe currently Southern California is in a different "region" than Northern California.

I don't think so. Changes like this are to eliminate layers of management to cut costs, reduce some big divisional president and regional vice president positions along with their teams. It would not be that different from other retailers to have each region, division, whatever be 600 to 700 stores which would mean California is all one. So you take the entire company down to only 3 regions each with its own President and the field team (District, HR, LP etc) reports to them. Saves many millions of dollars.

The way I read it, the company has the Regions:

East, West, California

Then they have the Divisions as part of the Regions:

California: NorCal Division, SoCal Division
West: Portland, Seattle, Intermountain, Phoenix, Denver, Texas, United
East: Jewel, East Acme/Safeway, Shaws

If they want to consolidate divisions and get away from the current 11 division structure, further I'd suggest something like this:

1. Region 1: California (North and South combined)
2. Region 2: Northwest (Portland, Intermountain, and Seattle combined)
3. Region 3: Southwest (Phoenix, Dallas, United combined)
Finally get rid of Denver- or split the scraps of it that are actually viable up among Region 2 and Region 3
4. Region 4: Jewel (it can stand alone)
5. Region 5: East (Acme/Safeway/Shaws)