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Kroger is closing 3 stores in LA after a new law mandated an extra $5 an hour for essential workers.
Kroger also closed stores in Seattle and Long Beach, California, following hazard pay laws.
Across the US, 134 grocery store workers have died and 28,700 have been infected due to COVID-19.
Kroger is closing three stores in Los Angeles after the Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of a hazard pay law that mandates large corporations to pay an extra $5 per hour to frontline essential workers.
The store closures one Ralphs and two Food 4 Less locations will eliminate the jobs of 250 employees, CNN first reported. The company will work to reassign within the company the employees affected by the store closures.
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Kroger s total sales surged 8.4% to $132.5 billion in pandemic-ravaged 2020 – tallying extra receipts to add the equivalent of nearly two Fortune 500 companies to its total revenues.
The Cincinnati-based grocer also posted a $2.6 billion profit for the year, a 5.6% increase. A key sales metric, identical sales without fuel, increased 14.1% in 2020.
Kroger s growth was propelled by an epic shift of customers food consumption habits amid the COVID-19 pandemic: nearly $1 of every $4 that Americans used to spend going out to eat has shifted away to food consumed at home – so that s $162 billion extra mostly going into supermarket coffers, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In early 2020, Americans were spending 49 cents of their food dollars at grocery stores, they are now spending about 56 cents.