Kroger Employees Struggle With High Cost of Living

In a survey commissioned by the United Food and Commercial Workers union and carried out by nonprofit Economic Roundtable, a substantial share of Kroger employees who live in areas with high cost of living have said that they struggled at least once between mid-2020 and mid-2021 to afford necessities like groceries or rent.

The survey includes workers in Colorado, where a strike of more than 8,000 employees of the Kroger-owned King Soopers supermarket chain started Wednesday after a contract renegotiation between the union and the company broke down. Workers and union representatives in the state have cited soaring cost of living, including for health insurance, as reasons for not accepting the latest contract offer from King Soopers and accused the company of not sharing stellar pandemic profits with its frontline workers. King Soopers is meanwhile keeping stores open with non-union employees and temporary workers.

39 percent of the surveyed Kroger employees said that they could not afford enough groceries at any point in the past twelve months. 44 percent said that they had lacked rent money in the same way. The survey showed that younger employees, who typically have less seniority and earn less, were more affected by these problems than older workers.

42 percent of surveyed workers said that they had borrowed money in the past year for basic expenses. 14 percent even said that at any point in the past twelve months they didn’t have a designated place to sleep.

The survey was carried out in the summer of 2021 among Kroger employees in Southern California, Colorado and the Puget Sound region of Washington state – all regions known for their high cost of living. The paper calculated that workers across the three markets were lacking around $16,000 in annual compensation in order to be earning a living wage. Again, workers who hadn’t been with the company for a long period of time experienced the biggest living wage gaps – the equivalent of around $6-$7 in hourly earning for those employed for fewer than two years and $4.66 per hour for those who had been with the company for more than two but fewer than five years.