(Colorado Newsline) Colorado grocery workers joined labor advocates and elected officials outside Denver city hall  Monday to rally against a proposed $24.6 billion merger between the nation’s two largest supermarket chains, as a two-week trial in the state’s antitrust case against the deal got underway inside.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser in February sued to block the merger between grocery giant Kroger, which operates King Soopers and City Market stores in Colorado, and Albertsons, which operates the Safeway brand. Weiser’s suit alleges that the deal violates state antitrust laws and would inflict “substantial harm” on Colorado consumers and workers.

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“When these CEOs promise not to shut stores if the mega-merger goes through, do we believe them?” Ramon Zuniga, treasurer for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, asked the crowd on the steps of Denver’s City and County Building. “When they promise not to lay off workers if this mega-merger goes through, do we believe them? When they promise lower prices if the merger goes through, do we believe them? No, we don’t.”

Kroger, which is based in Ohio and operates more than 2,700 grocery stores nationwide, first announced plans in 2022 to acquire the Idaho-based Albertsons, which operates more than 2,200 locations. One of the largest retail mergers ever proposed, the deal has been staunchly opposed by labor unions and consumer advocates who fear that the consolidation could lead to higher prices and decreased wages and bargaining power for workers.

Earlier this year, the companies detailed a divestiture plan in which they propose to sell 579 locations nationwide — including 91 Safeway stores in Colorado — to New Hampshire-based C&S Wholesale Grocers, in a bid to allay antitrust concerns. But critics of the plan have painted C&S, a supplier that currently operates just 23 retail locations nationwide, as a struggling company with shaky finances, unequipped to operate 579 newly acquired stores as an “effective competitor” to the merged Kroger-Albertsons behemoth.

Carol McMillian, a King Soopers employee and a member of UFCW Local 7 for more than 20 years, said Monday that she feared the Kroger-Albertsons deal would lead to a repeat of the “horror story” that grocery workers experienced following the 2015 merger between Albertsons and Safeway.

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“There were store closures, there were job losses, there were communities that were devastated,” McMillian said. “There were other businesses that were also destroyed. There were large empty buildings left in the wake of the devastation.”

Weiser’s lawsuit echoes those fears, arguing that the terms of the 2015 merger, which included the divestiture of 168 stores to the small regional grocery chain Haggen, “utterly failed to ameliorate the anticompetitive effects of the (Albertsons) acquisition of Safeway.”

“Haggen went bankrupt within months of the divestiture sale, (Albertsons) bought back many of the stores, and many other stores soon shuttered,” including 20 stores in Colorado, the state’s lawsuit says. It similarly calls the Kroger-Albertsons plan an effort to offload the companies’ “worst-performing and least desirable stores,” which “demonstrates that Kroger does not want to face a strong competitor post-merger.”

A Kroger spokesperson didn’t return a request for comment Monday. Kroger and Albertsons executives have defended their merger plan as a necessary step to help traditional grocery stores compete with big-box retailers like Walmart and delivery services like those provided by Amazon, pledging that it would lead to “lower prices and more choices” for consumers.

In addition to Weiser’s lawsuit in Denver District Court, the merger has been challenged by the Federal Trade Commission. A three-week trial in that case concluded in the U.S. District Court of Oregon earlier this month. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson has also sued to block the merger. The terms of Kroger’s proposed acquisition expire on Oct. 9, after which the parties could renegotiate or exit the deal.

In a statement released last week, Weiser said his lawsuit had resulted from a yearlong investigation and 19 listening sessions held in communities across the state, calling the proposed deal “bad for shoppers, workers, suppliers, and farmers.”

“Nearly two years since the companies announced the merger, we finally have the chance to prove in court why this deal would be bad for Colorado and the country,” Weiser said.

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and X.