Kroger Looks to Add 11,000 Supermarket Workers--Update
11 April 2018 - 4:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Heather Haddon
Kroger Co. is hiring 11,000 workers to improve customer service
and efficiency at its thousands of stores as competition among food
retailers heats up.
Kroger said the new positions at its nearly 2,800 supermarkets
will include 2,000 managers and represent a 2% increase to its
workforce of about 450,000 full- and part-time employees. The
hiring push is part of a three-year plan to focus on overhauling
existing stores instead of building as many new ones as in past
years.
The largest U.S. supermarket chain wants to put more workers in
stores instead of its Cincinnati headquarters, a spokeswoman said.
Last year Kroger gave voluntary buyouts to 1,300 white-collar
workers to cut costs as sales slumped. Kroger has also fined
suppliers to collect revenue and improve performance, as has
Walmart Inc.
Kroger is facing tougher competition for shoppers. Amazon.com
Inc.'s purchase of Whole Foods Market is prompting grocers to speed
up digital investments. At the same time they are feeling pressure
to keep prices low as European deep-discounters Aldi and Lidl
expand in the U.S.
"The core issue in food retail remains the high degree of
bottom-line uncertainty," analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote to
investors recently.
Kroger's stock was up slightly Tuesday, but remains down around
14% this year.
Food retailers are also competing for workers in the tightest
U.S. labor market in nearly two decades. The unemployment rate held
at 4.1% on Friday for the sixth straight month, a 17-year low. Job
openings are at a record high.
The worker shortage is even more pronounced in the Midwest,
where a net 1.3 million people who were living in the region in
2010 had left by the middle of last year, according to the Census
Bureau. Slow population growth, the aging baby boomer generation
and fewer immigrants than the rest of the country has held back
labor-force growth there. Midwestern states including Ohio, Indiana
and Michigan are toward the top of those with the most Kroger
stores.
Kroger, Walmart, Target Corp. and other food retailers are also
investing savings from the federal tax law to boost worker pay and
benefits. Kroger has said it would spend $500 million on worker pay
and benefits, including raising starting wages in some regions to
$10 an hour.
--Shayndi Raice contributed to this article.
Write to Heather Haddon at heather.haddon@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 10, 2018 14:14 ET (18:14 GMT)
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