Angry customers confront David, a King Soopers employee at a store in Denver, two or three times per day. “Sometimes they’re mad at me, sometimes at the situation,” says David (not his real name). “Recently, there’s been a marked increase in customers asking to speak to a manager.”

The complaint is almost always the same: overcharging, in which the price on an item’s expired sales tag is lower than the price that rings up at the register. This widespread issue exists, David says, because of understaffing. At his store, a single employee is usually assigned to update thousands of tags every time prices change as weekly sales begin and end. “Last week, they wanted nearly 10,000 tags updated in 16 hours,” he says. One person was assigned to the job, and two more volunteered to help.

“And it still didn’t get done, because it was impossible,” he says. “Our team gives 100 percent, but if we’re not 100 percent staffed, we can’t do it.” He says he often explains this to disgruntled customers. “Most people get that it’s not my fault, but about once a day, there’s a big blowup.”

He’s seen customers yell and become agitated. Once, he says, he watched a shopper brandish a gun at a checkout clerk. The store security guard chased the man, and another shopper called the police. “Management never showed up,” he says. (A Denver Police Department spokesperson confirmed that officers responded to a call at David’s store on that date but declined to provide more details, citing the fact that the suspect is still at-large.)

So, David isn’t surprised when he reads all the bad press King Soopers and its parent company, Kroger, have been receiving. In May, a Consumer Reports investigation at 26 Kroger-owned stores in six states found rampant overcharging on more than 150 items, with an average price difference of more than 18 percent per item. When customers complain about being overcharged for a specific item, workers are quick to fix it—but many shoppers don’t notice, and the issue persists. That’s true to David’s experience: “Management just says ‘We’ll figure it out,’ and then they never do,” he says.

And why would they? “Managers get a nice bonus if they come in under budgeted hours,” David says, so there’s a strong incentive to keep stores running with a skeleton crew. (“We intentionally staff our stores to keep them running smoothly and create an outstanding customer experience,” a Kroger spokesperson wrote in response via an email to 5280. “Our decisions are data-driven to balance workload, schedules, and customer service.”)

Understaffing seems to have accelerated over the last few years. Though the number of Kroger-owned stores stayed about the same from 2019 to 2024, the average number of employees per store was cut by 10 percent, and remaining staffers are each working an average of 10 fewer hours per week, Consumer Reports found. Overcharging isn’t the only way shoppers bear the brunt of the cuts, David says; he regularly sees boxes of fresh produce wilting in the stockroom, still in shrink-wrapped pallets, because there aren’t enough workers to put food on the shelves. Meat and dairy often expire while waiting to be stocked, he says. David isn’t the only worker to report this: In an Economic Roundtable survey published last month, 70 percent of workers at Kroger-owned stores said that food sits in their store’s backroom due to understaffing.

Even then, health inspections don’t always catch food waste due to spoilage. “It just goes right back out the door, thousands of dollars of it every single day,” David says. “I actually think it’s a morality issue to waste food on that large a scale.” (David’s store hasn’t had any recent health code violations, according to public records. Last year, the store on North Krameria Street was cited for a three-month-long problem with rodent droppings in the back storage area; that infestation appears to have been resolved.)

“We’re committed to providing a safe environment and upholding the highest food safety standards to ensure quality food for our customers,” a Kroger spokesperson wrote in response via email to 5280. “Our stores follow strict quality assurance processes, and associates are fully trained to meet all federal, state, and local regulations.”

David, a King Soopers employee, shared this photo of food piling up in his store. Due to understaffing, he says he and his co-workers struggle to get it all on the shelves before it spoils.

Also not a surprise to David: the fact that many of his coworkers are living in poverty. Only 16 percent of Kroger and Albertsons workers who responded to the Economic Roundtable survey said they earn enough to pay for basic expenses every month. Thirty-three percent spend more than half of their earnings on rent, nine percent are late on paying rent, and five percent have been homeless within the last year. “I know at least two people who are living out of their cars while they work at the store,” David says. “A lot of people use SNAP and EBT benefits, because they’re not paid enough to feed themselves, even though we work at a damn grocery store, checking out other people’s food all day.”

It wasn’t always this way, says Dawn Thilmany, a professor of agricultural economics at Colorado State University. “Historically, Kroger had a much better reputation,” she says. “I knew producers who said they were a good partner to sell through, that they valued getting local Colorado product in their stores. They were known for being good to their workers, for having pathways to growth and management roles. All of that got completely annihilated over the last 20 years.”

Why? Most likely because of increased pressure to compete with Walmart and Amazon, Thilmany says. More customers are ordering groceries online, and although Kroger is a huge company (it owns an estimated nine percent of the U.S. grocery market), Walmart and Amazon are even bigger. In the grocery business, which has razor-thin margins, that makes a difference for the type of customer who is chasing the absolute lowest price. “E-commerce came out of nowhere, and COVID accelerated it greatly,” Thilmany says. “It’s all about efficiency and fast delivery of products now.”

Ben, who has worked at King Soopers locations across the Denver area for the last 10 years, echoed that sentiment. “The company is vastly different from when I started,” he says. (Like David, he asked for a pseudonym out of fear of potential retaliation from his bosses; 5280 verified that they are both current employees.) “Management was better, pay was better, the vibe was better. Now it’s just wild, the cost-cutting.… The other day, a push broom broke in our department, and they won’t even order a new broom because it’s not in the budget.”

He says his store doesn’t have an armed security officer—which he finds troubling, especially considering the 2021 shooting at a Boulder King Soopers that left 10 people dead—and with frequent altercations between customers and staff, he says he fears for his safety and is thinking about quitting.

“We work with local law enforcement and professional security teams who adapt to the unique needs of each location,” a Kroger spokesperson wrote to 5280 via email. “While we don’t disclose specific security protocols to protect their effectiveness, they are regularly reviewed and updated.” The spokesperson also disputed Consumer Reports’ findings and the employees’ claims of understaffing. “Kroger is committed to affordable and accurate pricing, and we conduct robust price check processes that review millions of items weekly to ensure our shelf prices are accurate,” the spokesperson wrote. “It is also inaccurate to say the company reduced standards or labor hours.… We intentionally staff our stores to keep them running smoothly while creating an enjoyable place to shop.”

Both David and Ben are members of UFCW Local 7, the union representing 10,000 King Soopers workers who went on a 12-day strike in February, demanding better pay and working conditions. Another strike, which could also include Safeway workers, could begin as early as this week. Kroger has not agreed to workers’ demands, and the union has since taken the dispute to court. “This lawsuit is about ensuring King Soopers is held accountable for failing to honor the agreement they made,” union president Kim Cordova said in a statement in April. (Cordova did not reply to an interview request from 5280.)

Kroger raked in record profits last fiscal year: $3.85 billion. “If Kroger wanted to right its ship, it’s not clear that it couldn’t,” Thilmany says. “Look at Costco. They pay their workers more than average, they have high worker and customer satisfaction, and they have really good stock performance. So they are a powerful counterargument to this idea that we have to race to the bottom.”

Customers certainly don’t seem happy. Last month, when King Soopers featured prominently on a ranking of the nation’s worst grocery stores, around 450 comments were left on a Reddit thread about the list, with the vast majority voicing their dislike of the brand. One described their local store as “a festering s—hole”; another wrote, “I will literally pay more to shop anywhere else.”

Shoppers in the thread swapped recommendations for Sprouts, Natural Grocers (which is based in Lakewood), and Trader Joe’s. But these national chains lack the luster of other areas’ acclaimed regional grocery brands, which are so beloved as to be a matter of state pride (think Publix in Florida, H-E-B in Texas, and Wegmans on the East Coast).

In the absence of a Colorado answer to Publix or H-E-B, Thilmany has observed a resurgence in small, local shops. “I think some customers are deciding that maybe the one-stop shop concept is the problem,” she says, “and so we are seeing more bakeries, butchers, and cheese shops start to reappear. This is a reversal of the consolidation trend we’ve been seeing for so long. People are realizing that food is part of their quality of life, and they want better choices.”

For their part, David and Ben told 5280 that they are reluctant to shop at their own stores, given what they’ve experienced: A 10 percent employee discount doesn’t mean much when you factor in the rampant overcharging. David buys some food at his store, but never deli meat or cheese, out of safety concerns: “Many of those items I see sitting out of temperature control for hours at a time.” Ben avoids shopping at King Soopers altogether. “I usually go to Safeway or Sprouts,” he says.