Kroger has said it will sell 26 stores in Texas to comply with antitrust concerns around its proposed plan to buy Albertsons.
The list hasn’t been made public, and the number of stores sold could increase. Most of those stores are expected to be in Dallas-Fort Worth where there’s more overlap since the combined chains operate four supermarket brands here: Kroger, Albertsons, Tom Thumb and Market Street.
In Dallas-Fort Worth, only two of the 12 divested stores in the 2015 Albertsons acquisition of Tom Thumb’s parent company Safeway are operating supermarkets today.
Originally, the stores were sold to Minyard Food Stores which the founding family sold to investors in 2004. Then it changed hands a couple of times. A San Angelo couple owned Minyard in 2015, when the local company bought the 12 Albertsons and Tom Thumb stores that were sold.
Stores were converted to Minyard Sun Fresh Market and then closed in less than a year. Two stores in North Dallas and Bedford were sold again to Fiesta Mart and one in Plano to Kroger. Those stores reopened to close again within a year. Some locations sat vacant for years and were leased in the last two years to fitness centers.
Two are still operating as grocery stores.
Central Market opened a third store inside the Dallas city limits in a former Albertsons on W. Northwest Highway and Midway Road in 2018.
Albertsons regained control of two leases for Tom Thumb stores it had been forced to divest in McKinney and Grapevine and reopened those stores in May 2017. The Grapevine store is closing. The last day is Feb. 24. At the same time, Albertsons is converting its namesake store in Grapevine to the Tom Thumb brand.
The most cited example from the 2015 merger is the sale of 146 stores to Pacific Northwest regional grocer Haggen which went bankrupt less than a year later and closed stores. Albertsons ended up with more than 50 of those stores, buying them back at auction — in some cases for $1, according to a lawsuit filed in January by the Washington state attorney general asking a court to block the Kroger acquisition of Albertsons.
