Seattle shoppers skeptical about Kroger promise to slash prices

Kroger has vowed to take on discounters like Walmart by slashing grocery prices at all its stores, including Fred Meyer and QFC.

Cincinnati-based Kroger will cut prices “across thousands of products” by improving how it stocks its stores and also plans to make customer service friendlier and faster, CEO Greg Foran told Bloomberg last week.

Those promises were getting mixed reviews in and around Seattle.

Some Kroger shoppers were dubious of meaningful price cuts from a retailer that appears to be struggling after its failed merger with Albertsons and multiple store closures, including in Washington, where it currently runs 54 QFC and 54 Fred Meyer stores.

“Zero confidence,” said George Wing, a shopper at the QFC in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, when asked Thursday about the likelihood of lasting price reductions. “A month from now, prices will be back up.”

Others worry Kroger will pay for price cuts by further reducing store staff.

“What else can they cut?” asked Forrest Carroll, another Seattle QFC regular. “People.”

A Seattle-area Kroger spokesperson didn’t have additional details about when prices would fall or whether Kroger was expecting more staffing cuts.

Kroger’s strategy got a better review by several industry experts, who think the retailer can trim a lot of fat by changing how it works with suppliers.

The potential savings “from sourcing and distribution are huge,” said Mike Trafton, a former vice president at Safeway who used to compete with QFC in Western Washington in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

There’s also optimism around Foran, who spent five years turning around U.S. operations at Walmart, widely regarded as a global leader in efficient retail distribution and sourcing.

“No retailer in the world does this better than Walmart,” said Chris Anderson, a University of Washington economist who studies food systems.

Kroger has said it plans to cut costs by buying directly from food manufacturers, rather than traditional wholesale distributors, and will also offer more of its own budget-priced private label products.

Those are both moves Walmart has used effectively to peel off customers from midpriced chains like QFC and Safeway, especially as grocery prices have jumped in recent years.

Anderson thinks Foran will also borrow another Walmart strategy and prune back some of the tens of thousands of different products Kroger now sells. Fewer products will make it easier and cheaper to restock stores, Anderson said.

“What they want to do is send as few trucks as possible to each of their stores and use those trucks really efficiently,” Anderson said.

Kroger could see significant savings even by cutting a few thousand individual products, Anderson said, particularly for hard-to-source items that can delay shipments.

Foran did a similar streamlining at Walmart after concluding the retailer sold too many versions of the same product.

“I think we had nine different variants of Ritz Original Crackers, from a single pack to a double pack to a flat pack to a bonus pack, to a, to a, to a … What are we doing here?” Foran once told investors, according to a book about Walmart by Jason Del Rey.

Even United Food & Commercial Workers, the major union representing Kroger employees, offered backhanded praise for one of the retailer’s cost-cutting measures.

Last year, Kroger said it was closing several e-commerce fulfillment centers after acknowledging it had built too many.

The union contends Kroger had been raising prices “to cover massive losses in their ecommerce department, which they launched to harvest customer data (to) sell to third-parties,” said Rich Smith, a spokesperson for UFCW 3000, which represents workers in Washington and parts of Oregon and Idaho, in an emailed statement Thursday.

“So this news gives us some hope that (Kroger’s) new leadership will focus on trying to run grocery stores instead of data brokerage firms,” Smith said.

Kroger isn’t getting out of e-commerce, which now accounts for about 11% of total sales, but will rely more on Uber and other outside delivery operators, according to The Wall Street Journal.

UFCW also cautioned against further staff cuts in stores, which the union claims are already so understaffed that customers are leaving out of frustration.

UW’s Anderson says staffing is one of the grocery industry’s toughest challenges.

Labor is one of the biggest costs for grocery retailers, especially for unionized chains like Fred Meyer and QFC, and grocers and other retailers have leaned hard into self-checkout and other automation to lower costs.

But Anderson thinks the fact that Kroger is talking up customer service means they’ll try to preserve as much staffing as possible, and look for savings in other operations.

Adequate staffing will also be necessary for Kroger to stand out from Walmart, which many shoppers see as having relatively low levels of service,” Anderson said.

Kroger’s turnaround is hardly assured, experts warn. The company was counting on the scale from the Albertsons merger to gain bargaining power with suppliers.

Kroger was also buffeted by the resignation of its CEO, Rodney McMullen, in early 2025, and an inflation surge that sent shoppers to discounters and contributed to a $1.3 billion quarterly loss late last year.

Kroger has since returned to profitability, but now must sustain it as it goes head-to-head with hyperefficient competitors like Costco, Walmart and Amazon.

Kroger may also face backlash from its own customers, warns Trafton, the former Safeway executive.

When retailers make even modest cuts in product assortment, “you’ve got to go through some customer pushback in the beginning,” he says.

Shoppers may also be disappointed by price cuts that don’t come quickly or which seem to be concentrated only in places where Kroger has competition.

“The biggest price cuts we’re going to see are where you’ve got a Walmart within a few miles,” Anderson said, adding that customers in other neighborhoods might not see as much of a difference.

That’s the expectation for shoppers like Wing at the QFC in Wallingford.

The North Seattle neighborhood, Wing says, “is a fancy ZIP code,” and QFC has little nearby competition from discounters.

Others, like Hope Hensley, a QFC shopper for decades, said she’d be happy to see cheaper groceries, but wasn’t holding her breath, given that retailers almost never give back the gains they’ve already made.

“Once prices go up,” she said, “they very seldom come down.

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This story was originally published May 26, 2026 at 7:42 PM.