The next few months aren't going to be much fun for Utah's 5,000 Albertson's employees, as they wait to learn whether their particular store will be one of the 165 "underperforming" units the Boise-based grocery chain said last week it will close.
The company's Utah division (non-store) employees probably won't be making any "big ticket" purchases, either, until they find out whether they will be among the 15-20 percent of managerial and administrative workers targeted for termination.
There's also the question of whether the Utah operating division will be one of the four the company says it will eliminate, dropping the total from 19 to 15.
The action by the nation's second-largest grocery retailer is one of those "restructuring" blood-lettings that occur so predictably when a company bites off more than it can chew.
In this case, Albertson's has had the former American Stores stuck in its craw since it bought the Salt Lake-based chain in 1999, doubling its stores to 2,500 in 36 states. Albertson's new chairman and CEO Larry Johnston is now determined to stop the gagging.
An Albertson's spokeswoman said the closures and layoffs won't begin until September, and it could take as long as 12 months before the shakeout is over. She said the company doesn't want to announce a store closure as much as a year ahead of time because it would hurt sales as customers began looking for alternatives.
I suppose that makes sense from the corporate point of view, but I don't imagine the company's employees or customers appreciate it. Instead of limiting the damage to 165 stores and a specific group of workers, it brings all 2,500 stores and 235,000 workers into play.
Albertson's has eight subsidiaries, but the only one operating in Utah is its namesake supermarkets, of which there are 46, each with about 100 employees.
The only hint Albertson's has given of its intentions is that a quarter of the closures will be among its Osco Drug and Sav-On divisions, which wouldn't hurt Utah at all.
It's even conceivable that all 46 Utah Albertson's stores, the Utah division and the 5,000 local employees could emerge unscathed from the downsizing. Aye, there's the rub, as Hamlet would say. If the powers that be at Albertson's know, they're not saying.
A reader took exception last week to my story reporting that former Zions Bancorp. chief financial officer Dale Moroni Gibbons exercised Zions stock options the day before his resignation from the bank to prepare to defend himself against three felony charges involving drug abuse and child endangerment.
The reader said the "insinuation" from the article "which links a legitimate commercial transaction to an individual's personal lifestyle . . . leads the uninformed to believe that a person who exercises stock options and realizes a profit of $900,000 has done something wrong. Why the article and what is your point?"
There is no "point," of course, other than that I am in the news business and when a top-level banker makes more money on stock options the day before his resignation than many people make in their entire working lives — that's news. As for the notion that Gibbons did something wrong in exercising his stock options, he didn't, and nowhere in the story does it say that or "insinuate" that.
Gibbons' actions are simply more newsworthy than those of someone more obscure — ask Rep. Gary Condit about that. Or ask me. Because of my public position and who I represent, if I were to be arrested and charged with a crime, you can be sure that the local news media would consider it more newsworthy than could possibly be justified by, for example, my income. That's just the way it is.
E-MAIL: max@desnews.com