Category: Alberta

Financial Update For Employees

Posted on by Sudhanshu Rewari

Safeway employees,

Last week, our CEO Michael Medline announced this year’s first quarter financial results for Empire Company Limited, the company that owns Sobeys and Safeway.

While the results are positive, there is much more work that we need to do. The grocery industry is tough, competition is growing and we aren’t even close to where we need to be in the Safeway brand if we are to be successful.

On the business side, we’re focused on Project Sunrise. This is about cutting costs and realigning our business so we can put ourselves in a leadership position once again. To put it simply, this is about making sure our back-stage structures and staff are better organized and equipped to support our stores, making it simpler for us to do business and easier for you to do your jobs. We still have a long way to go and we know change isn’t easy, but we will see it through.

For Safeway, this means we must continue to tackle our challenges. Even with the changes we’re making through Project Sunrise, we still face some of the highest costs in the industry. This must change!

We want Safeway to regain its place as one of the top grocery stores in Western Canada. We want customers to think of Safeway first when they choose where to shop. In order to do this, we must get our costs under control.

Project Sunrise is one piece of this puzzle, as we continue working at store level to improve our bottom line, all with the goal of building a successful Safeway with good stable jobs for the future.

Thanks for your hard work and dedication. Only by working together can we make Safeway a leader again.

 

Jason Potter

Executive Vice President, Operations

Financial Update for Employees

Posted on by Sudhanshu Rewari

Safeway employees,

Earlier this week our CEO Michael Medline announced quarterly results for Empire Company, the company that owns Sobeys and Safeway.

These results are important not only to our shareholders, but also to you, our employees. Ultimately you, are a big part of tackling our challenges and securing our future. These results are a measure of how we are all doing. The numbers Michael announced this week told us we are on the right track. But they also confirmed there is much more to be done.

As Michael said, “we are not where we want to be and we are most certainly not out of the woods yet. Although we are doing a better job of managing our day-to-day business, we remain in the nascent stages of delivering significant cost savings while addressing a number of brand and customer offering opportunities that will provide a compelling reason for consumers to shop us more.”

What does this mean for Safeway? It means we are at the very early stages of getting back to being the place where customers want to shop. That is how we will build a strong and growing company, with stable jobs for our people. To be able to do that, we have to do many things at Safeway — including getting a handle on costs which, right now, are among the highest in this crowded and brutally competitive industry. We have to address this issue since doing nothing won’t make our challenge go away. Addressing it gives us a path forward.

For more information on the results, you can find the full comments here.

You can also read some of the coverage here.

We’re in this together.

Jason Potter