Kroger blames theft for Puget Sound area store closures, but the real story is more complicated.
In the next two months, Kroger will close multiple Fred Meyer stores across Western Washington, including those in Lake City (Seattle), Redmond, Everett, and Kent. The company blames a “steady rise in theft” and a “challenging regulatory environment,” and promises to reassign workers elsewhere. UFCW 3000, the grocery workers’ union, reports that more than 700 employees will be affected.
Does crime alone explain these closures?
Retail theft has risen in some places since 2019, but the story is not so simple. Even the industry’s own reports are debated, and locally, shoplifting was down at several of the stores now being shuttered. Profitability pressures, real estate costs, and broader corporate strategy clearly play a role. Theft may be part of the story, but it is not the whole story.
The hunger link: food prices and theft
What Kroger does not mention is just as important. Food prices have surged, more than 20% in Washington since 2020, with basics like eggs, milk, and produce climbing fastest. Pandemic-era SNAP boosts expired, leaving families with less buying power.
When theft rises, part of it is hunger in action. When it comes to Kroger, people aren’t typically stealing flat-screen TVs; they’re stealing bread, cereal, and produce. In that sense, the grocery store is telling on itself. Its own price hikes fuel the desperation. And Kroger’s response is not to find a solution and maybe ease the burden, but to close doors, punishing entire neighborhoods in the process.
How closures deepen food deserts and scarcity
When a full-service grocer leaves a neighborhood, it doesn’t just take away a shopping option; it reshapes the local food landscape. Competition shrinks, which means prices rise and choices narrow. Families end up paying more whether they stay local or spend extra time and money traveling farther.
For seniors, disabled residents, and families without cars, the impact is sharper: a grocery trip becomes a logistical barrier instead of a routine errand. In places like Lake City and Tacoma’s South End, where alternatives are already limited, the loss of Fred Meyer pushes these neighborhoods closer to becoming food deserts.
And it’s not just about groceries. Fred Meyer closures also erase access to pharmacies, affordable household goods, and everyday essentials. What remains is scarcity: fewer fresh options, higher costs, and a community forced to stretch already thin resources even further.
“Food banks can cover it” is a myth
Some claim food banks can make up the difference. But in 2024, food pantries in Washington logged 13.4 million visits, a 70% increase since 2021. One in four residents has turned to hunger relief. Food banks provide emergency support, not daily sustenance. They cannot fill the massive gap left by the closure of anchor grocers; they are already stretched to the breaking point.
So why these locations?
Look at the map: multicultural, working-class corridors (Tacoma South End, Kent, Everett, Lake City renters and seniors) plus a high-cost, tech-adjacent city (Redmond) where the building is expensive to maintain. Selecting these sites externalizes costs onto those communities, transportation time, delivery fees, and lost pharmacy access, while Kroger’s balance sheet improves, at least in the short-term, apparently.
What helps in the short term
There are steps that ease the strain. Diversion programs can ensure hunger-driven shoplifting is met with compassion while enforcement focuses on violent crime and organized theft. Safer store design, adequate staffing, and union guarantees of relocation can protect workers and shoppers. Transit support and waived delivery fees for SNAP users can bridge the gap until new anchors are secured.
Local governments can also help fund co-op groceries or nonprofit takeovers of vacated sites. These “feel-good” fixes matter. They cushion families and buy time. But they don’t shift the underlying power imbalance between one corporation and entire communities.
True transformation requires confronting the outsized influence corporations hold over essential necessities like food access. Communities cannot be left at the mercy of decisions made by shareholders thousands of miles away. Cities like Detroit and Minneapolis have demonstrated how co-op groceries, supported by public investment, can stabilize access when large chains withdraw. Stronger antitrust enforcement, such as recent federal actions against monopolistic pricing in agriculture, also demonstrates that corporate power can be checked when governments act with resolve.
And when local governments seed food infrastructure, whether through land trusts, nonprofit takeovers, or zero-interest loans for community grocers, they help build models of shared ownership and resilience. When families can shape, own, and govern the places where they shop, they are no longer at the mercy of corporate exit strategies. Only then do we move from patchwork relief to lasting food justice.
Changing Kroger’s calculus
To truly put neighborhoods first, tougher measures are required. Kroger must be made to see staying as the better option. Right now, it calculates that abandoning working-class neighborhoods is cheaper than serving them. That math must change.
Public subsidies and incentives should come with strings attached. Kroger benefits from tax breaks, zoning allowances, and fast-track permits when it builds or expands. Public subsidy databases show Fred Meyer (Kroger) received Washington state tax credits/rebates in 2014–2016, with details not publicly disclosed, illustrating how large chains can leverage incentives that smaller grocers rarely access. If it abandons underserved communities, public dollars should trigger automatic clawbacks, mandatory reinvestment into replacement food access, or funding set aside for community-owned alternatives. Public dollars cannot fund corporate abandonment.
Governments also have legal tools. Antitrust oversight exists to protect consumers when competition collapses, which is exactly what happens when anchor grocers leave. Local officials can also slow or block future projects, expansions, zoning changes, and permits until Kroger commits to equity in its existing stores.
The pending Kroger-Albertsons merger is another pressure point. Regulators could require binding community benefit agreements as a condition of approval, ensuring that Kroger cannot grow while cutting off access to the very neighborhoods that sustain it. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration is very unlikely to go this route.
Collectively, consumers have leverage, and a reputational hit could hurt Kroger at the local stores that remain open. Kroger sells trust along with groceries. Broad media coverage of rising hunger alongside Kroger’s profits could raise the political cost of abandonment and make closure reputationally toxic.
Finally, communities themselves can shift the landscape by building alternatives. Co-op conversions, nonprofit grocery takeovers, and municipally run “community groceries” show that neighborhoods don’t have to beg corporations for food access. The more real those alternatives become, the more pressure Kroger feels to stay engaged.
But alternatives can’t grow in isolation. They need supportive policy scaffolding, grants, low-interest financing, zoning preferences, and public procurement partnerships that provide community grocers with the same advantages as big chains. Just as important, workers and shoppers must be at the center of governance, ensuring that decisions reflect community well-being rather than quarterly returns. By leveling the playing field, governments can turn co-ops and nonprofits from fragile experiments into durable institutions that Kroger and other chains must now reckon with as real competition.
Closures are not inevitable. They are a choice Kroger makes because it believes the consequences are manageable. It is the responsibility of government and communities to raise the stakes, to make the political, reputational, and economic costs of abandoning entire communities higher than the costs of staying and doing business as if nothing happened. That is how Kroger’s mind can be changed.
