Safeway

T com. I've been using them to print postage straight from my home And I couldn't imagine doing it any other way at t com Slash company man and right now they have a special offer that includes a four-week trial free postage and a free digital scale Safeway has easily been one of the most significant Supermarket chains in the United States helping shape the concept itself into what we all know it is today I mean for almost 100 years now They have consistently been ranked among the biggest and for well over a decade throughout the 1970s and 1980s They were widely considered to be the biggest from there It's been pretty wild they fell from their peak and have certainly had some questionable years But amazingly they have still remained relevant. It all depends on how you measure it I don'think there is a single metric that gives an accurate picture of their ups and downs over the years You'll see what I mean as we go But when looking at their n Here's what I mean by that The name of it Safeway is derived from the fact that unlike many of the competing stores at the time They did not offer credit to their customers forcing them to pay with cash I think we all know that credit can be risky Especially in those years leading up to the Great Depression and cash is the Safeway to do it also around that time It was pretty standard for the people working in the store to go around and collect the items You need from a shopping list that you gave them But Safeway was among the first to let their customers shop around the store and gather their own items in 1935 They were the first chain to start including expiration dates on perishable food labels giving customers much more confidence about the freshness of the items That they were buying in that same decade They were also among the first to set the price of their produce based on the weight of it instead of buy the piece or buy the bunch in The 1970s they were one of the first to label their ground beef with fat content to s 7 billion dollars now if you watch this channel often You are probably thinking and that right here is where everything went bad for Safeway, but it is not that straightforward It really depends on how you look at it Many people will tell you that this buyout was actually a tremendous thing for them and honestly I can see how they have a point see over the next couple of years Safeway quickly lost that n 4 billion dollars They then used those proceeds to reduce their debt to a more manageable level That was the motivation behind the sales in the first place and the stores that remained were much more efficient Even though their n 7 billion dollars and Randalls a channel of over 100 stores in Texas that was bought the following year for 1. 7 billion and by the early 2000s both of them had already started struggling And customers did not respond well to the changes that Safeway had made to them primarily involving product selections and staff reductions If you happen to have shopped at either one of them around that time, let me know how you felt about the changes It's probably not good considering that they lost a lot of business evidence by the fact that Safeway had to record goodwill impairments of hundreds of millions of dollars for each of them and that contributed to the billion dollar net loss that they reported between 2002 and 2003 also contributing to that net loss was Interest at that point they were paying over $400 million a year interest because they had to borrow a lot of money to make those ill-fated acquisitions after all of that effort They had done to reduce it their dad had crept back up to a new all-time 6 billion to buy the remaining percentage of vans in Southern, California a store that in 2003 it was involved in a major four month long strike of grocery store employees in that region Walmart was entering the area and Safeway was trying to lower pay and benefits to remain competitive in the end They came to an agreement But the whole they figured out exactly how sweet their customers wanted a grape to be and then went out and found suppliers that could grow grapes with that Specific level of sweetness they expanded their private label brands 6 billion dollars they sold it to so bees and then use that money to reduce their debt so again a smaller but more stable operation finally in 2014 Safeway was bought by Albertans in a nine billion dollar deal and then in 2022 it was announced that Kroger agreed to buy Albertans for 24 billion dollars There were questions about regulatory approval, but everything is consolidating or rebranding is different stores and blending the products and Operations at times so I don't know it'starting to feel Let me know in the comments What do you t Are they better or worse than all these other supermarkets and what makes you say that if you have been shopping there for decades? How have they changed over that time? Do those changes line up with how I presented it And finally what do you see for the future of Safeway? Are they strong enough to break out and become more significant again? Or are they going to continue downward into a relevance and any other thoughts you have about Safeway leave them in the comments? I'd com is the sponsor of today's video and they have saved me so much time Just consider how much of our world is now digitized or automated with food delivery and smart thermostats So why would we still be waiting around at the post office with t With Stamps. com you will never go to the post office again because they are your one-stop shop for all of your s com Slash company man for a four-week trial free postage and a digital scale one more time that is stamps. com Slash company man.