Interesting times at Sainsbury's, this year they've made most of the store management reapply for their jobs or get made redundant, got rid of all the supervisors in the stores, and are making all of the colleagues in retail sign new contracts or lose their jobs, and now there are store closures ahead! At least we still have jobs though, a lot of retailers have fallen this year.
I still remember Somerfields. :P
Fuck that. There's little competition as it is - this is just predatory monopolistic capitalism at its finest. Consumers will only lose out as a result because one competitor will leave the market and another company will increase in size.
Yeah, it is generally bad for the consumer. At the moment the market is oligopoly, but this will bring it closer to a duopoly. Imagine if your only choice was Tesco + 1 other retailer. I don't think it will happen though, we have those Aldi/Lidl cheap German warehouse supermarkets as well.
Plus the last thing I want is our supermarkets to be owned by Walmart, imagine how crap that would be. (Walmart is Asda's parent company)
And the big companies get bigger, and the prices will get higher. Fuckin great.
'Murcan checking in: It would indeed be awful. WM is pretty much the only practical source of general household supplies where I live. Sure, sure, there's a publix across town, but it's another $4-$6 in gas to get there and another 20% more expensive, which isn't an option for Walmart's primary customerbase.
It's a race to the bottom.
I still remember Safeway. The Morrison's takeover improved it a fuck load.
yo Kwik Save was the real deal
nah, that place was garbage as far as I remember, but I don't remember much about them.
I thought this merger would be somewhat illegal but maybe I'm overestimating the size of Sainsbury's and that the merger wouldn't cause a monopoly? I know that Asda is the largest, but I'm not sure which other chains fall where in the list of size.
Kwik Save gave my mum and brother food poisoning with funky chicken. They sent us more chicken as an apology.
There's still a lot of competition, a merger would actually mean they'd only take up 30% of the market, which is pretty much what tesco already has. It pretty much means that you'd actually have a company big enough to take on tesco's current market share.
It'll be up to the competition authority if having 60% of the market share belonging to two companies is fair, but in the grand scheme of things each company still has 70% of the market to compete against.
I guess when you have the massive company like walmart behind asda, it's pretty easy to forget that ASDA isn't actually that much of a powerhouse here.
