The story
Founded by Marion Barton Skaggs in 1915, in American Falls.1
History
Marion Barton Skaggs, who already had experience in the grocery business, moved to Portland, Oregon in 1921, and established four grocery stores. This chain of stores grew quickly, and Skaggs enlisted the help of his five brothers to grow the network of stores. By 1926, he had opened 428 stores bearing the family name in 10 states. He then almost doubled the size of his business that year when he merged his company with 322 Sam Seelig Company stores and incorporated as "Safeway, Inc." because he thought a corporate chain that would outlive him should not carry his name.
Safeway was chosen as the name because the stores operated exclusively on a cash-and-carry basis; they did not offer credit to customers, as American grocers traditionally had done. It was the "safe way" to buy food because a family could not get into debt via its grocery bill (as many families did at the time, a contributing cause of the Great Depression in the United States). Thus, the original slogan was: "Drive the Safeway. Buy the Safeway".
The 1926 merger came about because of Charles E. Merrill, the founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm, who saw an opportunity to consolidate the West Coast grocery industry. Towards this end, he purchased the 322-store Safeway chain of W.R.H. Weldon, who wished to exit retailing and concentrate on wholesale. Then, in June 1926, Merrill offered Skaggs either $7 million outright or $1.5 million plus 30,000 shares in the merged firm. Skaggs took the latter. On July 1, 1926, Safeway merged with the 673 stores from Skaggs United Stores of Idaho and Skaggs Cash Stores of California. On completion of the Skaggs/Safeway merger, M. B. Skaggs became the Chief Executive of the business. Two years later, Skaggs listed Safeway on the New York Stock Exchange. In the 1930s, Safeway introduced produce pricing by the pound, adding "sell by" dates on perishables, nutritional labeling, and some of the first parking lots.
The merger instantly created the largest chain of grocery stores west of the Mississippi. At the time of the merger, the company was headquartered in Reno, Nevada. In 1929, it was relocated to a former grocery warehouse in Oakland, California, where it had the exclusive zip code of 94660. Safeway headquarters remained there until they moved to their new offices across from Stoneridge Mall in Pleasanton, California, in 1996. In the 1930s, Charles E. Merrill temporarily left Merrill Lynch to help manage Safeway.
In the late 1930s, the New Negro Alliance boycotted the Sanitary Grocery Company (then a Safeway subsidiary) to pressure store owners to employ black people, especially in predominantly black neighborhoods. The Sanitary Grocery Company successfully sought an injunction against the New Negro Alliance, which was upheld by the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals. This led to the 1938 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co., which defended the right to peaceful protest in the resolution of labor disputes.
In 1969, the Black Panther Party and the United Farm Workers launched simultaneous boycotts of Safeway grocery stores, which were the largest grocery store chain in the U.S. West at that time. The Panthers boycotted due to Safeway's refusal to donate to their Free Breakfast for Children Program, created to serve daily hot breakfasts to underprivileged children throughout the U.S. The United Farm Workers boycotted Safeway because the chain continued to sell California grapes despite the union's nationwide boycott. The Panthers and United Farm Workers also acted in solidarity with each other's goals in boycotting Safeway, including during a 1973 Panthers demonstration outside an Oakland Safeway store documented by KPIX Eyewitness news, in which protestors carried signs that read "Boycott Safeway, Boycott Grapes".
1940s–1970s
In 1941, Marion B. Skaggs retired from the Safeway board of directors.
In 1947, the company's sales exceeded $1 billion for the first time. By 1951, total sales had reached nearly $1.5 billion. The company adopted the S logo, which it still uses, in 1962.
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In 1955, Robert A. Magowan became Chairman of the Board of Safeway. Magowan had married Charles Merrill's daughter, Doris. Magowan also assumed the title of President in 1956. He remained president until 1968 and a member of the board until 1978. In 1966, Robert A Magowan brought his star meat processing plant manager, Michael F. Concannon, to Oakland to become the Head of Meat Processing in North America. He retired in 1978 as well. Mike was instrumental in opening the Stockton plant. The Wichita plant and meat processing in Canada began in the 1970s.
In 1959, Safeway opened its first store in the new state of Alaska – the first major food retailer to enter that market. The company opened three stores in Anchorage and one in Fairbanks over the next several years. The store in downtown Fairbanks was built on the site of a red-light district, known as The Line, which operated for close to a half century. Most of these stores were in buildings constructed by Anchorage real estate developer Wally Hickel, who later became governor of Alaska and U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
Also in 1959, designed by architects Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons, the firm also opened the first "marina-style" store on the Marina in San Francisco.
The exterior mosaic murals on the east side of the building were created by John Garth. The murals depict food being transported from the four corners of the globe. Garth created murals for three other Safeway stores.
Hundreds of stores in this barrel-vaulted-roof style opened during the next decade.
In 1961, the company sold its New York operations to Finast. In 1963, Safeway again opened stores in Hawaii, having exited this market in 1934. It leased one store in Culver City to animator/filmmaker Don Bluth, who used it as a theater until 1967.
In 1969, Safeway entered the Toronto market in Canada and the Houston market in Texas through opening new stores, rather than by acquisition. The firm ultimately failed against entrenched competition in both these markets.
In 1977, Safeway management instituted a program to fight counterfeit $100 bills by, among other things, telling employees that bills that lacked the words "In God We Trust" were counterfeit. Because Safeway had not sufficiently investigated the history of $100 bills, it was unaware that some bills still in circulation did not have the phrase. Eventually, an innocent shopper was incorrectly reported to Oakland, California, police for passing a "counterfeit" bill. He was arrested and strip-searched before Oakland police contacted the Treasury Department and realized the error. The 1981 jury verdict of joint and several liability for $45,000 against Safeway Stores and the City of Oakland was upheld in full by the Supreme Court of California on December 26, 1986.
In 1979, Peter Magowan, son of Robert Magowan and grandson of Charles Merrill, was appointed chairman and CEO of Safeway. Magowan managed Safeway for the next 13 years – presiding over the dramatic decline of the firm in terms of store numbers
Safeway corporate information
Support offices
California
Pleasanton, California (Headquarters), Corporate Call Center, IT Support Services, Retail Pricing
Colorado
Denver, Colorado (Offices, Safeway Security, Trucking)
Arizona
Phoenix, Arizona (Offices, Accounting Offices, IT)
Maryland
Lanham, Maryland (Eastern US Headquarters)
Store music and intercom announcements
Safeway music is provided by Stingray Advertising. The network beams commercials and advertisements for Safeway products and services that play intermittently with the music. The store's unique "Attention Service Desk" announcements, which are used to communicate phone calls on hold to employees, are generated by Cisco's Call Manager Server as an overhead announcement.
Animal welfare concerns
In 2012, Mercy for Animals conducted an undercover investigation at Christensen Farms, a pork supplier to Safeway, Walmart, Costco, Kroger, and Kmart. Before the public release of Mercy for Animals' investigation at Christensen Farms, Safeway announced it would begin requiring pork suppliers to phase out gestation crates.
In 2008, Greenpeace started ranking America's major supermarket chains on their seafood sustainability practices because, according to Phil Radford, Greenpeace U.S. CEO, "three quarters of global fish stocks are suffering from overfishing, and 90% of top marine predators are already gone". Criteria included the number of threatened fish species supermarkets sold, their seafood purchasing policies, and ocean legislation policies it supported. Greenpeace annual Carting Away the Oceans (CATO) report ranks supermarkets on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being least sustainable with seafood policies and 10 being the most sustainable with seafood policies. Safeway ranked second best (7.1 out of 10) on the 2013 CATO Report by ensuring that its store brand of canned tuna was sustainably fished and by lobbying for science-based ocean conservation policies.
In 2016, Safeway parent company Albertsons joined a growing wave of companies moving toward "cage-free" egg production and announced a planned shift to cage-free eggs by 2025 following campaigns by The Humane League, Mercy for Animals, The Humane Society of the United States, and others. Following the passage of California Proposition 12, Lucerne and O Organics switched to full cage-free egg production at their facilities in California in January 2022.
401(k) plan mismanagement lawsuit
In July 2021, Safeway Inc. and its co-defendants reached an $8.5 million settlement in a class action lawsuit alleging mismanagement of the company’s 401(k) retirement plan. The lawsuit, Terraza v. Safeway Inc. et al., was filed in 2016 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. It accused Safeway, the Safeway Benefit Plans Committee, and investment advisor Aon Hewitt Investment Consulting, Inc. of breaching fiduciary duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), resulting in financial harm to over 30,000 plan participants.
From Wikipedia’s article on Safeway, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7