The 110-Year-Old Grocery Chain Everybody Seems To Hate Has Been Closing Stores All Year

While it's never a good thing to hear about a grocery chain closing stores, some may feel a little less bad if they have negative feelings regarding the company itself. This much has clearly been the case for Safeway, one of the oldest grocery store chains in America (albeit not as old as Kroger), which has announced it will be closing down yet another location in the Bay Area of California. The company, which was founded in 1915, announced that the 231 W. Jackson St. location in Hayward is set to close its doors next February.

This comes after numerous closures for the company across the country have occurred in recent months, most notably in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and California. In the case of the latter state, Safeway has already closed three locations in the Bay Area so far this year, leaving customers out of luck if they were frequenters of the massive chain. However, with another location in Hayward expected to remain open for the foreseeable future, the question of whether or not Safeway can retain scorned customers, who have been fed up with Safeway stores, through these closures remains a massive one.

Beyond the people directly impacted by the closure of these Safeway locations, many former and current employees of the store have expressed their negative feelings about working at the chain. While some ultimately put the blame for the sometimes toxic work environment at Safeway on individual store managers and employees, others have noted that the problems seem to be particularly frequent at the 110-year-old chain. And this atmosphere among workers has become incredibly apparent among customers as well, being heralded as one of the worst grocery chains when it comes to employee helpfulness in America.

Speaking of customers, they have been criticizing the chain for a myriad of reasons, from its mediocre rotisserie chickens that many have called overly dry to some stores having major stocking issues and allegedly selling expired goods to customers. "Over the past five years, half of the Safeways in town have descended into chaos. They are obviously understaffed and become magnets for petty crime and loitering," wrote one Redditor based in Spokane, Washington. Unfortunately, with Safeway locations steadily closing across the country, many employees and customers continue to feel and see additional hardships as a result of the chain's current instability.