Albertsons will get 12 Washington stores in Haggen auction

Albertsons is the big winner of Haggen’s bankruptcy auction in Washington state.

The grocer, which sold 146 stores to Haggen earlier this year, was the high bidder for 12 of 13 Haggen stores in Washington state, according to documents filed at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware on Friday morning, Nov. 13.

All told, Albertsons was the high bidder for 34 of the 55 stores that received a bid, including stores auctioned in Arizona, California, Oregon and Nevada. According to the documents, another 40 stores did not receive a bid, including five in Washington.

Haggen announced in an email that the 55 stores sold for more than $47 million. Haggen plans to submit the results of the auction for approval to the bankruptcy court at a hearing on Tuesday, Nov. 24. A previous sale of 36 stores to Gelson’s and Smart & Final was for $92 million.

The auction, held earlier this week, did not include Haggen’s so-called core stores, including the five in Whatcom County. Earlier this week, Haggen filed court documents requesting a January auction of those core stores.

Several of the Washington stores won by Albertsons will be converted to the Safeway brand.

Albertsons and Safeway merged earlier this year, partly because the companies were able to sell the stores to Haggen in order to gain Federal Trade Commission approval. Now, many of those communities are getting what they had before the Haggen acquisition that led to the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in September.

The former Haggen stores in Monroe, two in Burien, Puyallup and Milton will become Albertsons stores. The former stores in Everett, Shoreline, Port Orchard, Spanaway and Gig Harbor will become Safeway stores. Renton, which has two stores in the auction, will end up with a Safeway and Albertsons.

The one Washington store that didn’t go to Albertsons was in Liberty Lake, where Yoke’s Foods was the high bidder.

Auction results of the former Haggen stores in California, Arizona, Nevada and Oregon show a variety of high bidders, including Smart & Final and Sprouts.

Messages left for both Haggen and Albertsons seeking comment about the auction were not immediately returned.

The results come as welcome news for some of the communities wondering about the fate of these large retail buildings. Gig Harbor Mayor Jill Guernsey announced on the city’s website that she was thrilled to have Safeway return. The store was originally a Safeway before the Haggen acquisition.

“We are confident that this store will once again be a tremendous success for the entire community and we look forward to helping them reopen as Safeway as soon as possible,” Guernsey said on the website.

One customer at the Haggen store in Milton welcomed the news that Albertsons might return.

“It’s like a dream, like that ‘Dallas’ episode. I hope it’s like a dream,” said Lori Neckermann told The News Tribune in Tacoma.

She said she appreciated having both Albertsons and Safeway nearby.

While disappointed that not all the Washington stores were successfully sold off in this round, the auction was a positive outcome from a union worker standpoint, said Tom Geiger, communications director for the United Food and Commercial Workers 21. He added that the auction will mean some job stability in areas where it looked like the result would be an empty building.

“Given where we were a month ago, this is a positive step,” Geiger said.

The UFCW is already in Albertsons stores, so the union is familiar with the company. Geiger said the relationship between the union and the company is a fairly positive one. Geiger said Albertsons is a company that’s been on the mend after struggling for a few years. In bouncing back, the company has been investing more in upgrading its stores. That may bode well for the union as it prepares for contract negotiations in early 2016.

“The hope is in 2016 we can come up with a good contract,” Geiger said.

As for the store locations that didn’t receive a bid, Geiger there’s still some time to find buyers, but that window is rapidly closing as those stores continue to have closing sales and are winding down operations.

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 9:53 AM with the headline "Albertsons will get 12 Washington stores in Haggen auction."