Connect with us

Business

New L.A. Trader Joe's opens across the street from … another Trader Joe's

Published

on

New L.A. Trader Joe's opens across the street from … another Trader Joe's

Earlier this month, Trader Joe’s celebrated the grand opening of a new store located on the ground floor of an apartment complex in Sherman Oaks.

The chain isn’t new to the neighborhood, however. Just across the street is another Trader Joe’s — a “legend” that has served customers since 1973, store representatives said.

The initial plan was to close the old location when the new branch was ready — both are off the 101 Freeway on Riverside Drive. But in the end, the company decided it might be “fun” to keep both open, according to Matt Judd, the new store’s manager.

“Our business in this city has been so tremendous, so we decided to keep them both,” he said. “The city deserves it.”

The new store is about 40% bigger than the one across the street, with a large selection of products and more aisles for customers to browse, Judd said. It also offers parking in an underground garage — a big draw for customers wary of navigating the old cramped parking lot.

Advertisement

On Friday around noon, customers flowed in and out of the neighboring stores.

The new store is about 40% bigger than the one across the street.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

“This one’s way better,” customer Steve Emrick said as he grabbed a shopping cart to head into the new store. “The other store can get pretty congested, and the parking was not as tight here.”

Advertisement

Another shopper, Jacob Ruiz, said he frequented the older location, but was excited to visit the new one for the first time. He said parking was a breeze, and as he left, he swore he’d “never go back” to the other location.

But he also didn’t think the expansion was completely necessary for the area.

“Not here. They should venture out to other neighborhoods,” he said.

Both stores were still crowded — Judd said he expected lots of customers to stay loyal to the 1973 Trader Joe’s.

Olga Virov said she’s shopped at the smaller store for about 20 years. She was impressed by the parking options the new store offered, but since she normally walks to the grocery store, she didn’t see the need to make the switch.

Advertisement

“This one is more convenient. It’s cozy, and it’s easier for me to get to, so I prefer to go to this one,” she said of the older location. “I am not planning to go to that one unless I am shopping at the mall.”

Melany Figueroa-Garcia stopped at the older Trader Joe’s on a grocery run. She said she plans to keep shopping there, calling it cozier. Plus, she said she thinks the parking system at the new location is confusing. But she did like the option of a bigger location.

“If this location doesn’t have something I want, I walk over to the other location and get it,” she said.

In a statement to The Times, Trader Joe’s said that both stores are expected to remain open.

“Our goal is always to bring delicious products at great values to as many people as we can,” the statement said. “The best way to do that is to open more stores.”

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Business

Commentary: Does America need billionaires? Billionaires say 'Yes!'

Published

on

Commentary: Does America need billionaires? Billionaires say 'Yes!'

What’s the most downtrodden and persecuted minority in America?

If you said it’s transgender youths, immigrant workers or women trying to access their reproductive health rights, you’re on the wrong track.

The correct answer, judging from a surge in news reporting over the last couple of weeks, is the American billionaire.

I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of so much inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.

— Zohran Mamdani, candidate for NYC mayor

Advertisement

Concern about the welfare of this beleaguered minority (there are about 2,000 billionaires in the U.S.) has been triggered — or re-triggered — by the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s June 24 Democratic primary.

A self-described “democratic socialist,” Mamdani has had to weather bizarrely focused questions from cable news anchors and others about comments he has made about extreme wealth inequality in the U.S., and specifically in New York.

“I don’t think that we should have billionaires,” he told Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 29.

Welker had asked Mamdani, “Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist?” This was a weirdly tendentious way of putting the question. She made it sound as though he advocated lining billionaires up against a wall and shooting them. In fact, what he has said is that the proliferation of billionaires in America, and the unrelenting growth in their fortunes over the last decades, signified a broken economic system.

Advertisement

Nevertheless, the billionaire class and their advocates in the media and on cable news expressed shock and dismay at the very idea. “It takes people who are wealthy in New York to maintain the museums, maintain the hospitals,” John Catsimatidis, a billionaire real estate and supermarket tycoon, fulminated on Fox News. “Do you know how much money we put up to contribute toward museums and hospitals and everything?”

Catsimatidis may not have realized that he had proved Mamdani’s case: In New York and around the country, a tax structure that indulges the 1% with tax breaks has forced austerity on museums and hospitals and services that should be publicly supported. They’re public goods, and they shouldn’t be dependent on the kindness of random plutocrats.

The sheer scale of billionaire wealth in the U.S. prevents most people from understanding how historically outsized it is. “To own $1 billion is to possess more dollars than you’ll ever count,” observed Timothy Noah of the New Republic in a must-read takedown of the American oligarchy published last month. “It’s to possess more dollars than any human being will ever count. And that’s just one billion. Forbes counts 15 Americans who possess hundreds of billions.”

The most comprehensive defense of billionaires appeared July 1 in the Financial Times. It was written by Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business think tank that has advocated against increasing the minimum wage (in a article by Strain), against the Dodd-Frank post-Great Recession banking reforms, against environmental legislation and against tobacco regulations, among other bete noires of the right.

“We should want more billionaires, not fewer,” Strain writes. “While amassing their fortunes, billionaires make the rest of us richer, not poorer.”

Advertisement

Exhibit A on Strain’s docket is Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com magnate whose recent wedding in Venice is estimated to have cost as much as $25 million, tasteful and unassuming as we all know it to have been.

Strain cites the common estimate of Bezos’ personal fortune at about $240 billion. He then applies a calculation developed by Nobel economics laureate William D. Nordhaus in 2004, that only 2.2% of the social value of innovations is captured by the original innovators. If Bezos’ $240 billion is 2.2% of the social value of Amazon’s revolution in retailing, then Bezos must have created $11 trillion in wealth for the rest of us.

“Not a bad deal,” Strain writes.

Strain’s interpretation of Nordhaus is hopelessly half-baked. First, Nordhaus was talking about the gains captured by corporations, not individual entrepreneurs. Also, his estimate arose from abstruse economic formulas and lots of magic asterisks.

Nordhaus didn’t present his findings as a defense of any particular economic policies — the 2.2%, he wrote, was excess or “Schumpeterian” profits, those exceeding what would be expected from the normal return from invested capital, which implies that they’re somewhat illegitimate.

Advertisement

Further, it makes no sense to start with an individual entrepreneur’s wealth and extrapolate it to the social value of his or her innovation. It would be more appropriate to try to estimate the social value of the innovation, and then ask whether the innovator’s profits are too much, not enough, or just right.

I asked Strain to justify his treatment, but didn’t hear back.

Another issue with Strain’s advocacy is that he depicted every innovation as the product of a single person’s efforts. Elsewhere in his op-ed, he wrote that Bill Gates and Michael Dell “have made hundreds of millions of workers more productive by creating better software and computers, driving up their wages.”

He also cited Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who “revolutionized email, internet search and mapping technology”; he added that “many of us would eagerly shell out money every month for these services, if they weren’t provided by Google free of charge.”

(Is that so? If Google thought that consumers would eagerly pay for its services, you can be sure the company would find a way to charge for them, instead of making its money from advertising and sponsorship deals.)

Advertisement

This isn’t the first time that billionaires have felt abused by the zeitgeist. Back in 2021, I wrote that America plainly leads the world in its production of whining billionaires. My example then was Leon Cooperman, a former hedge fund operator who appeared on Bloomberg to grouse about proposals for a wealth tax. He called them “all baloney,” though a viewing of the broadcast suggested he was about to use another label beginning with “B” and caught himself just in time.

A few years earlier, in a ghastly letter published in the Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley venture investor Thomas Perkins compared the suffering he and his colleagues in the plutocracy had experienced due to public criticism to that of Jews facing Nazi pogroms. “I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich,’” Perkins wrote.

The truth, of course, is that while rich entrepreneurs love to pose as one-man bands, every one of them acquired their wealth with the help and labor of thousands of others. Many of the rank-and-file workers without whom Bezos, Dell and their fellow plutocrats could have reached their pinnacles of fortune have struggled in the oligarchic economy, relying on public assistance to make ends meet.

Bill Gates didn’t originally create “better software” — Microsoft’s original product was a computer operating system he sold to IBM, but which was developed by someone else, Gary Kildall. As of last year, Microsoft employed more than 220,000 people. Dell’s original innovation wasn’t a better PC, but a system of selling clones of IBM PCs by mail order.

It’s proper to question whether any of these innovations have been unalloyed social boons. Amazon may have revolutionized retail, but at the cost of driving untold mom-and-pop stores, and even some big chains, out of business, and paying its frontline workers less than they’re worth.

Advertisement

As for its benefits for consumers, in a lawsuit filed in 2022, California accused Amazon of hobbling retail market competition by having “coerced and induced its third-party sellers and wholesale suppliers to enter into anticompetitive agreements on price.”

The state said that “Amazon makes consumers think they are getting the lowest prices possible, when in fact, they cannot get the low prices that would prevail in a freely competitive market.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Amazon says the state’s claims are “entirely false and misguided,” and denies the state’s assertion that its agreements with vendors and suppliers are designed to “prevent competition” or “harm consumers.” The case is scheduled to go to trial in San Francisco state court in October 2026.

That brings us back to Mamdani. In questioning whether billionaires should exist in the U.S., he was implicitly repeating an observation favored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.): “Every billionaire is a policy failure,” a phrase generally attributed to AOC adviser Dan Riffle.

Riffle’s point is that the accumulation of such wealth reflects policies that exacerbate economic inequality such as tax breaks steered toward the richest of the rich, leading to the impoverishment of public services and programs. That trend has been turbocharged by the budget bill President Trump signed on July 4, which slashes government programs to preserve tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy enacted in 2017 by a Republican Congress and signed by Trump.

Advertisement

Mamdani adeptly underscored that point during his appearance on “Meet the Press.” “I don’t think that we should have billionaires,” he told Welker, “because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of so much inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.”

His prescription is to raise the state corporation tax by several percentage points to match that in neighboring New Jersey, and to add a 2-percentage-point city surcharge on incomes over $1 million, and use the revenue to finance free bus service, free child care and other public services.

The focus by cable news and other media organizations on the idea that Mamdani would erode New York’s economic base by driving the ultra-rich out of the city was as dubious as it was sadly predictable. Some of them have been feeding on spoon-fed pap by the rich and powerful for so long that — as A.J. Liebling once put it — they need to relearn how to chew. Then Mamdani would get a fair shake, and so would the rest of us.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Business

Companies keep slashing jobs. How worried should workers be about AI replacing them?

Published

on

Companies keep slashing jobs. How worried should workers be about AI replacing them?

Tech companies that are cutting jobs and leaning more on artificial intelligence are also disrupting themselves.

Amazon’s Chief Executive Andy Jassy said last month that he expects the e-commerce giant will shrink its workforce as employees “get efficiency gains from using AI extensively.”

At Salesforce, a software company that helps businesses manage customer relationships, Chief Executive Marc Benioff said last week that AI is already doing 30% to 50% of the company’s work.

Other tech leaders have chimed in. Earlier this year, Anthropic, an AI startup, flashed a big warning: AI could wipe out more than half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.

Ready or not, AI is reshaping, displacing and creating new roles as technology’s impact on the job market ripples across multiple sectors. The AI frenzy has fueled anxiety from workers who fear their jobs could be automated. Roughly half of U.S. workers are worried about how AI may be used in the workplace in the future, and few think AI will lead to more job opportunities in the long run, according to a Pew Research Center report.

Advertisement

The heightened fear comes as major tech companies, such as Microsoft, Intel, Amazon and Meta cut workers, push for more efficiency and promote their AI tools. Tech companies have rolled out AI-powered features that can generate code, analyze data, develop apps and help complete other tedious tasks.

“AI isn’t just taking jobs. It’s really rewriting the rule book on what work even looks like right now,” said Robert Lucido, senior director of strategic advisory at Magnit, a company based in Folsom, Calif., that helps tech giants and other businesses manage contractors, freelancers and other contingent workers.

Disruption debated

Exactly how big of a disruption AI will have on the job market is still being debated. Executives for OpenAI, the maker of popular chatbot ChatGPT, have pushed back against the prediction that a massive white-collar job bloodbath is coming.

“I do totally get not just the anxiety, but that there is going to be real pain here, in many cases,” said Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, at an interview with “Hard Fork,” the tech podcast from the New York Times. ”In many more cases, though, I think we will find that the world is significantly underemployed. The world wants way more code than can get written right now.”

As new economic policies, including those around tariffs, create more unease among businesses, companies are reining in costs while also being pickier about whom they hire.

Advertisement

“They’re trying to find what we call the purple unicorns rather than someone that they can ramp up and train,” Lucido said.

Before the 2022 launch of ChatGPT — a chatbot that can generate text, images, code and more —tech companies were already using AI to curate posts, flag offensive content and power virtual assistants. But the popularity and apparent superpowers of ChatGPT set off a fierce competition among tech companies to release even more powerful generative AI tools. They’re racing ahead, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, facilities that house computing equipment such as servers used to process the trove of information needed to train and maintain AI systems.

Economists and consultants have been trying to figure out how AI will affect engineers, lawyers, analysts and other professions. Some say the change won’t happen as soon as some tech executives expect.

“There have been many claims about new technologies displacing jobs, and although such displacement has occurred in the past, it tends to take longer than technologists typically expect,” economists for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a February report.

AI can help develop, test and write code, provide financial advice and sift through legal documents. The bureau, though, still projects that employment of software developers, financial advisors, aerospace engineers and lawyers will grow faster than the average for all occupations from 2023 to 2033. Companies will still need software developers to build AI tools for businesses or maintain AI systems.

Advertisement

Worker bots

Tech executives have touted AI’s ability to write code. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that he thinks AI will be able to write code like a mid-level engineer in 2025. And Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella has said that as much as 30% of the company’s code is written by AI.

Other roles could grow more slowly or shrink because of AI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment of paralegals and legal assistants to grow slower than the average for all occupations while roles for credit analysts, claims adjusters and insurance appraisers to decrease.

McKinsey Global Institute, the business and economics research arm of the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., predicts that by 2030 “activities that account for up to 30 percent of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated.”

The institute expects that demand for science, technology, engineering and mathematics roles will grow in the United States and Europe but shrink for customer service and office support.

“A large part of that work involves skills, which are routine, predictable and can be easily done by machines,” said Anu Madgavkar, a partner with the McKinsey Global Institute.

Advertisement

Although generative AI fuels the potential for automation to eliminate jobs, AI can also enhance technical, creative, legal and business roles, the report said. There will be a lot of “noise and volatility” in hiring data, Madgavkar said, but what will separate the “winners and losers” is how people rethink their work flows and jobs themselves.

Tech companies have announced 74,716 cuts from January to May, up 35% from the same period last year, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a firm that offers job search and career transition coaching.

Tech companies say they’re reducing jobs for various reasons.

Autodesk, which makes software used by architects, designers and engineers, slashed 9% of its workforce, or 1,350 positions, this year. The San Francisco company cited geopolitical and macroeconomic factors along with its efforts to invest more heavily in AI as reasons for the cuts, according to a regulatory filing.

Other companies such as Oakland fintech company Block, which trimmed 8% of its workforce in March, told employees that the cuts were strategic not because they’re “replacing folks with AI.”

Advertisement

Diana Colella, executive vice president, entertainment and media solutions at Autodesk, said that it’s scary when people don’t know what their job will look like in a year. Still, she doesn’t think AI will replace humans or creativity but rather act as an assistant.

Companies are looking for more AI expertise. Autodesk found that mentions of AI in U.S. job listings surged in 2025 and some of the fastest-growing roles include AI engineer, AI content creator and AI solutions architect. The company partnered with analytics firm GlobalData to examine nearly 3 million job postings over two years across industries such as architecture, engineering and entertainment.

Workers have adapted to technology before. When the job of a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman was disrupted because of the rise of online search, those workers pivoted to selling other products, Colella said.

“The skills are still key and important,” she said. “They just might be used for a different product or a different service.”

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Business

Why Kroger is closing 60 stores: 'One hit after another'

Published

on

Why Kroger is closing 60 stores: 'One hit after another'

After a series of setbacks, Kroger’s recent decision to close 60 locations nationwide is the latest sign of distress for the grocer that operates more than 300 stores in California.

Kroger, the parent company of Ralphs and Food 4 Less, is reducing its footprint after the resignation of its chief executive and a failed merger with competing grocery giant Albertsons. The company faces a lawsuit related to the merger and also has been struggling with labor unrest.

Employees had been threatening to strike until the company reached a tentative agreement with the United Food and Commercial Workers union this week.

Based in Cincinnati, Kroger also owns Harris Teeter, King Soopers and Dillons. The company operates more than 2,700 stores under different brands across the country and offers fresh goods, some household items and pharmacy services.

Advertisement

“Instead of popping champagne and toasting to their merger, Kroger is instead just enduring one hit after another,” said Jeff Wells, lead editor at the trade publication Grocery Dive. “They’re still a pretty stable business, but they’re facing a lot in terms of challenges.”

Impending closures

Kroger announced late last month in its quarterly earnings report that it plans to close 60 stores over the next 18 months. The company did not disclose which locations would be shut down.

“We’re simplifying our business and reviewing areas that will not be meaningful to our future growth,” interim Chief Executive Ronald Sargent said in an earnings call. “Today, not all of our stores are delivering the sustainable results we need.”

Kroger temporarily paused routine store closures while the Albertsons merger was pending, Sargent said. The company normally closes about 30 stores per year, Melius Research analyst Jacob Aiken-Phillips said.

The company is on track to complete 30 major store projects this year and expects to accelerate store openings in 2026, Sargent said on the earnings call.

Advertisement

Competitive market

Kroger is under increasing pressure from competitors, experts said, some of which offer a wider range of items and convenient one-stop shops.

“Kroger faces this intensely competitive field in the grocery industry,” Wells said. “From Walmart to Costco to Whole Foods and Sprouts Farmers Market, everybody in the industry is kind of gunning for them.”

The Albertsons merger would have given Kroger the scale to compete with giants such as Walmart and Amazon, Aiken-Phillips said.

“After the merger failed, they had to reexamine their strategy and focus on how they can grow and compete without that scale,” he said. “That’s the major challenge right now.”

Kroger relies on pharmacy services, advertising and e-commerce for additional revenue, experts said. Although the company grew its e-commerce business 15% in the first quarter of this year, the business remains unprofitable.

Advertisement

A chief executive shuffle

Former Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen stepped down in March after an investigation into his personal conduct, the company announced. Sargent was appointed chairman of the board of directors and interim CEO.

Kroger did not share details of the investigation into McMullen. His “personal conduct, while unrelated to the business, was inconsistent with Kroger’s Policy on Business Ethics,” the company’s statement said.

“When he resigned, it threw a wrench in progressing the company because now you need a new leader to come in,” Aiken-Phillips said.

A failed merger

In 2022, Kroger agreed to buy Albertsons for $24.6 billion, a sale that would have been the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history.

The Federal Trade Commission, California and several other states sued to stop the merger, arguing that it would hobble competition in many parts of the country, leaving customers at the mercy of a newly formed behemoth and driving up prices. Kroger and Albertsons collectively own about 5,000 grocery stores.

Advertisement

In late 2024, Albertsons scrapped the deal after a federal judge in Oregon issued a preliminary injunction in the case. The high-stakes court battle centered on concerns that the megamerger would add to the financial woes of consumers who have grappled with the rising cost of food.

Albertsons also sued Kroger, claiming that the grocer didn’t do enough to win over regulators. Kroger has since countersued.

Ongoing labor unrest

In June, grocery workers at Albertsons and Kroger — numbering about 45,000 — voted to authorize a strike to protest what they called unfair labor practices. A walkout would have caused a major disruption for two of the nation’s largest grocery chains during the busiest season of the year.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union announced Thursday that it reached a tentative agreement with the two companies that would allow them to avoid a strike. The union will vote on whether to approve the agreement July 9-11.

“Following an intense 40 plus hour bargaining session that began on Friday morning, we’ve secured an agreement that addresses our priorities,” the union said in a statement.

Advertisement

The agreement includes higher wages, improved pension plans as well as health and welfare improvements, the union said. Kroger did not respond to requests for comment.

Continue Reading

Trending