Kroger and Albertsons saw their $24.6 billion merger blocked on Tuesday by judges in two separate cases, one brought by federal regulators and the other by the Washington state attorney general.

What would be the biggest grocery merger in U.S. history is now in legal peril after over two years of delays. The companies could choose to continue their legal appeals or abandon the deal. They await another ruling in a third lawsuit in Colorado.

Kroger runs many familiar grocery stores, including Ralphs, Harris Teeter, Fred Meyer and King Soopers. Albertsons owns Safeway and Vons. In statements on Tuesday, the companies argued the courts erred in their judgment and said they were evaluating their options.

Tuesday’s first ruling is a big win for the Federal Trade Commission. It — together with several states — had asked a federal court in Oregon to stop the merger. The government argued that the resulting colossus would lead to higher food prices and fewer choices for shoppers and workers. In many markets, the two chains are each other’s biggest rival.

Kroger and Albertsons, in turn, have argued that together, they actually would have more power to lower prices, as well as to compete against other huge retailers that sell food, including Walmart, Costco and Amazon.

U.S. District Judge Adrienne Nelson on Tuesday ruled that the merger must halt while it undergoes the administrative review inside the FTC — a procedure that Kroger is separately challenging in court as unconstitutional. About an hour later, a Washington state court judge separately ruled that the merger violated that state’s consumer-protection law.

“Both defendants gestured toward a future in which they would not be able to compete against ever-growing Walmart, Amazon, or Costco,” Nelson wrote in her order. “The overarching goals of antitrust law are not met, however, by permitting an otherwise unlawful merger in order to permit firms to compete with an industry giant.”

Together, Kroger and Albertsons have nearly 5,000 stores and employ some 720,000 people across 48 states. They particularly overlap in western states.

Cases hinge on how Americans buy groceries

During the three-week federal trial in a Portland courtroom, the FTC and the companies painted differing views of the grocery market.

Kroger and Albertsons described their merger as existential to survival. They argued the FTC’s view of competition — focused on options a shopper might have in their neighborhood — was outdated in the wake of big-box behemoths and the sprawl of dollar stores.

Kroger officials testified that they typically compared their prices to Walmart, rather than Albertsons, and struggled to keep up given Walmart’s ability to negotiate better deals with suppliers thanks to its scale. Walmart is the biggest seller of groceries in the U.S., followed by Kroger and Costco.

The FTC, however, argued that someone who shops at Walmart, Costco, CVS or even Trader Joe’s likely still relies on their neighborhood supermarket. Government lawyers said enough people were concerned about the merger that the agency received an unprecedented 100,000 public comments.

Federal officials also shared complaints raised by labor unions.

Kroger and Albertsons are the rare unionized shops in retail. The companies argue that, in fact, serves as a reason why they should be allowed to unite to face up to bigger, non-unionized rivals. But the FTC says a merger would give the companies much more power over contract negotiations, leading to lower pay and worse benefits.

Questions about a plan to sell off some stores

The judge separately weighed the plan by Kroger and Albertsons to sell hundreds of their stores to a firm called C&S Wholesale Grocers as a condition of their merger, meant to appease regulators.

The idea is to create a new grocery rival in markets where Kroger and Albertsons currently overlap and, therefore, a merger would eliminate competition. C&S, a grocery supplier, had agreed to buy 579 stores in 18 states and in Washington, D.C.

But the FTC argued C&S would struggle to compete. The firm currently runs only 23 stores, mostly under the Piggly Wiggly brand, without much nationwide name recognition. Government lawyers shared internal notes, in which C&S executives raised concerns about the quality of stores they would acquire.

Kroger and C&S executives presented C&S as an experienced grocery company that could hit the ground running. Judge Nelson remained skeptical.

“There are serious concerns about C&S’ ability to run a large-scale retail grocery business that can successfully compete against the proposed merged business, as would be required to offset the competitive harm of the merger,” she wrote in Tuesday’s order.

The last time the government approved a grocery merger that hinged on divesting stores, it was 2015. Albertsons bought Safeway. It sold off 168 stores, then repurchased 33 of them on the cheap because one of the buyers filed for bankruptcy protection within months of the deal.

“Unprecedented” surely was one of the most popular words of 2024 so it’s fitting that my best books list begins with an “unprecedented” occurrence: two novels by authors who happen to be married to each other.

James by Percival Everett

James, by Percival Everett, reimagines Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of Jim, Huck’s enslaved companion on that immortal raft ride. Admittedly, the strategy of thrusting a so-called supporting character into the spotlight of a reimagined classic has been done so often, it can feel a little tired. So, when is a literary gimmick, not a gimmick? When the reimagining is so inspired it becomes an essential companion piece to the original novel. Such is the power of James.

Alternating mordant humor with horror, Everett makes readers understand that for Jim — here, accorded the dignity of the name James — the Mississippi may offer a temporary haven, but, given the odds of him making it to freedom, the river will likely be “a vast highway to a scary nowhere.”

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

Percival Everett is married to Danzy Senna, whose novel, Colored Television, is a revelatory satire on race and class. Senna’s main character, Jane, is a mixed-race writer and college teacher struggling to finish her second novel. Desperate for money, Jane cons her way into meeting a Hollywood producer who’s cooking up a bi-racial situation comedy. Senna’s writing is droll and fearless. Listen to Jane’s thoughts about teaching:

One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini strokes, it ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers and mystical dogs.

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Long Island is Colm Tóibín’s sequel to his 2009 bestseller, Brooklyn, whose main character, Eilis Lacey, is now trapped in a marriage and a neighborhood as stifling as the Irish town she fled. Abruptly, Eilis decides to visit her 80 year old mother back in Ireland, a place she hasn’t returned to in almost two decades, with good reason. There she’ll discover, much as another Long Islander named Jay Gatsby once did, that you can’t repeat the past. Tóibín floats with ease between time periods in the space of a sentence, but it’s his omissions and restraint, the words he doesn’t write, that make him such an astute chronicler of this working-class, Catholic, pre-therapeutic world where people never speak directly about anything, especially feelings.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

Tell Me Everything reunites readers with the by now familiar characters who populate Elizabeth Strout’s singular novels, among them: writer Lucy Barton, lawyer Bob Burgess and retired teacher Olive Kitteridge — all living in Maine. Nobody nails the soft melancholy of the human condition like Strout — and that’s a phrase she would never write because her style is so understated. Lucy and Olive like to get together to share stories of “unrecorded” lives. At the end of one of these sessions, Olive exclaims:

“I don’t know what the point is to this story!”
“People,” Lucy said quietly, leaning back. “People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.”
“Exactly.” Olive nodded.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Martyr! is Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel about a young man named Cyrus Shams struggling with depression and the death of his mother, who was a passenger on Iran Air Flight 655, an actual plane that was mistakenly shot down in 1988 by an actual Navy ship, the USS Vincennes. All 290 passengers on board that plane were killed. Early in the novel, Cyrus articulates his need to understand his mother’s death and those of other “martyrs” — accidental or deliberate — throughout history. Akbar’s tone here is unexpectedly comic, his story antic, and his vision utterly original.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake is a literary spy novel wrapped up tight in the soiled plastic wrap of noir. Kushner’s main character, a young woman who goes by the name of Sadie Smith, is a former FBI agent turned freelance spy who infiltrates a radical farming collective in France that’s suspected of sabotaging nearby agribusinesses. You don’t read Kushner for the “relatability” of her characters; instead, it’s her dead-on language and orange-threat-alert atmosphere that draw readers in.

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

In Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin. He weds these hardboiled elements to an eerie story about the actual vanished city of Cahokia, which, before the arrival of Columbus, was the largest urban center north of Mexico. Spufford’s novel is set in an alternative America of 1922 where the peace of Cahokia’s Indigenous, white, and African American populations is threatened by a grisly murder.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

There’s a touch of Gothic excess about Liz Moore’s suspense novel The God of the Woods, beginning with the plot premise that not one, but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family disappear from the same camp in the Adirondacks some 14 years apart. Moore’s previous book, Long Bright River, was a superb novel about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia; The God of the Woods is something stranger and unforgettable.

A Wilder Shore by Camille Peri

I’ve thought about A Wilder Shore — Camille Peri’s biography of the “bohemian marriage” of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson — ever since reading it this summer. In her “Introduction” Peri says something that’s also haunted me. She describes her book as: “an intimate window into how [the Stevensons] lived and loved — a story that is at once a travel adventure, a journey into the literary creative process, and, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life.” That it is.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell

This list began with the word “unprecedented” and I’ll end it with an “unprecedented” voice — that of Emily Dickinson. A monumental collection of The Letters of Emily Dickinson was published this year. Edited by Dickinson scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, it’s the closest thing we’ll probably ever have to an autobiography by the poet. Here’s a thank-you note Dickinson wrote in the 1860s to her beloved sister-in-law:

Dear Sue, 
The Supper was delicate and strange. I ate it with compunction as I would eat a Vision.

1,304 letters are collected here and, still, they’re not enough.

Happy Holidays; Happy Reading!

Books We Love includes 350+ recommended titles from 2024. Click here to check out this year’s titles, or browse nearly 4,000 books from the last 12 years.