The Million Dollar Grocery Store Club

Part 2 of The $200 Grocery Bill: An Uncomfortable Look at Why American Food Costs So Much

Investigative satire. Skeptical of everyone. Funny, but fact-based. Nobody gets off easy — including you.

George Carlin told you about the big club, and he told you you ain’t in it. He was right, but he undersold it. He made it sound exclusive. It’s not exclusive. It’s enormous. It has org charts. It has regional chapters. It has a newsletter — it’s called a proxy statement, it’s filed with the SEC every spring, nobody reads it, and it is, page for page, the funniest literature currently being produced in the United States of America.

You’re still not in the club. But here’s the part Carlin left out, and it’s the part this whole article is about:

You pay the dues.

Last time, I did something rude. I took the one guy everybody wanted to hang — the supermarket CEO — and I acquitted him. Not because he’s innocent of being rich. Oh, he’s guilty of that. Wildly guilty. Guilty in ways that would make a Renaissance pope blush. I acquitted him of your receipt, because the arithmetic demanded it: one man’s $29 million, divided across two-thirds of a trillion dollars of Walmart revenue, lands on your grocery cart like a snowflake lands on a battleship.

But I also told you to keep the pitchfork. Today you find out why.

Because “the CEO doesn’t cost you anything” is true the way “one mosquito doesn’t drink much” is true. Technically accurate. Profoundly misleading. Nobody gets exsanguinated by a mosquito. And no CEO travels alone. Today we open the door behind the CEO, and we walk down — title by title, layer by layer, board fee by board fee, jet by jet — and I am going to answer, with actual numbers, the question every one of these conversations dodges:

How does any of this reach my receipt?

It does. Three ways. I’ll show you all three, because I counted, and counting is how you know somebody isn’t bullshitting you.

But first, let’s meet the club.

The Membership Roster, As Legally Disclosed

The SEC makes every public company publish the pay of its top handful of officers — the “named executive officers.” Not all the executives. Just the ones they legally have to name. Think of it as the tip of the iceberg, if the iceberg filed paperwork.

Here’s the most recent tip, straight from the proxies:

Kroger named seven executives last fiscal year. Combined haul: about $46 million. That includes $14 million for Ron Sargent — the interim CEO. The temp. Kroger’s actual CEO resigned in March 2025 after a board investigation into his “personal conduct” — the company won’t say what, which means the guy who ran your grocery store was undone by the only thing in the building with no price tag on it. The board then set the temp’s salary at $4.35 million — roughly triple what the departed CEO’s salary had been. Read that again. The substitute teacher got triple. The median Kroger worker makes $34,213 a year. The company’s own disclosed pay ratio is 457 to 1. The temp beat the median employee 127-to-1 on salary alone, before the $10 million in stock. I have looked into it, and there is no application form to become an interim CEO. Believe me, I checked.

Albertsons named six. Combined: about $55 million. Hold that number, because in that same fiscal year — a rough one, with big one-time charges — Albertsons’ entire net income was $217 million. The six people running the company took home a quarter as much as the company made. (In a normal year it’s closer to six percent, which sounds better until you remember it’s six people versus a corporation with 2,200 stores.)

Walmart named five. Combined: about $133 million. Five guys. A third of a million dollars a day, collectively, weekends included. And the best-paid one wasn’t even the CEO. Walmart poached an executive from Instacart in August 2025 and handed him $44 million for five months of work. His title: Executive Vice President of AI Acceleration. Forty-four million dollars. To accelerate AI. AI is the fastest-moving technology in the history of the species — it does not need encouragement. Paying a man $44 million to accelerate AI is like paying a man to cheer for gravity. And yet somewhere in Bentonville, a compensation committee looked at that package, nodded solemnly, and said, “Yes. This is what the rotisserie chicken money is for.”

Now — and this is the important part — those are just the named ones. The SEC requires five to seven names. Kroger’s own annual report lists thirteen executive officers. Below those thirteen sit the division presidents — Kroger runs its 2,700 stores through more than a dozen retail divisions, each with its own president, and in January it created a brand-new Senior Vice President of Retail Divisions for the division presidents to report to, which means Kroger built a manager for its managers of managers. Below them: the executive vice presidents, the senior vice presidents, the group vice presidents, the regular vice presidents, the senior directors, the directors.

Nobody outside the building knows exactly how many. That’s not me being lazy — the companies don’t publish it, and I don’t print numbers I can’t source. But we know the shape. It’s a pyramid. It’s always a pyramid. And here’s a fun fact about pyramids that the Egyptians understood and Wall Street pretends not to: the tip is the smallest part.

Everything I acquitted last time was the tip.

The Nouns Have Taken Over

Before we do the money, we have to do the language, because the language is confessing.

Carlin spent forty years warning us about soft language — how “shell shock” became “post-traumatic stress disorder,” four syllables at a time, until the pain got buried under the vocabulary. He never lived to see the grocery org chart, and I consider that God’s one act of mercy toward the man.

These are real titles. Real companies. Real press releases. I verified every one, because the comedy only works if it’s true:

There is a “VP of Center Store Omnichannel Merchandising” at The Giant Company. Three consultant dialects fused into a single job title, like a corporate turducken. “Center store,” for those of you who speak English, means the middle aisles. The cereal. The canned beans. This is a vice president of where the crackers are.

General Mills — the Cheerios people — employ a “Chief Brand and Disruptive Growth Officer.” Cheerios. The single most stable consumer product in America. A toasted oat torus that has not changed since Truman. Disruptive.

Kraft Heinz has a “North America Zone Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer,” a title with so many nouns in it that by the time you finish saying it, the strategy has transformed.

Target has a “Chief Guest Experience Officer,” because at Target you are not a customer, you are a guest — a guest who pays for everything and then is asked to leave. Sam’s Club created a “Chief Member Officer.” UNFI, the giant grocery wholesaler, has one man serving as “Chief Supply Chain Officer and President of Natural, Organic, Specialty and Fresh Products.” One man. Seven nouns. When he enters a conference room, they have to hold the door for the title.

And my personal favorite, because it’s a two-act play: Kroger’s head of HR held the title “Chief Associate Experience Officer” — you’re not an employee stocking yogurt at 4 a.m., sweetheart, you’re an associate, having an experience — and then he retired, and in July 2026 Kroger named a new one with the title “Chief People Officer.” Which means somewhere in Cincinnati, a team of adults held meetings — plural — to rename the personnel department twice, and both times the word they refused to use was “personnel.”

Here’s why this matters, and it’s not just for laughs. Every euphemism on that org chart is a salary. The language didn’t bloat on its own — the language bloated because the payroll bloated, and each new layer needed a title nobody already had. Wharton’s been documenting this for years: titles are cheaper than raises, so companies mint them like wartime currency. Wikipedia’s list of corporate “chief officer” titles went from about ten entries in 2016 to more than fifty-five by the end of 2024. The C-suite is experiencing inflation faster than the eggs.

You want to know if a company’s overhead is growing? Don’t read the balance sheet. Read the job titles. The nouns arrive first, like ants before rain.

A Brief Deposition Regarding the COO

Lenny Bruce used to read his own court transcripts on stage — dry, verbatim, funnier than any bit he ever wrote — so in his honor, I’d like to enter the following deposition into the record. The witness is the org chart.

Q: What does the Chief Executive Officer do? A: He executes.

Q: Executes what? A: The operations of the company.

Q: I see. And what does the Chief Operating Officer do? A: He operates.

Q: Operates what? A: The operations of the company.

Q: So the CEO executes the operations, and the COO operates the operations. A: Correct.

Q: What, then, does the CEO do that is not operating? A: He sets the vision.

Q: The vision. And who executes the vision? A: The Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer.

Q: Then what does the CEO execute? A: …

Q: Let the record show the witness has requested a bio break.

No further questions, Your Honor. The defense rests, at approximately $16 million a year.

The Board: $36,000 a Meeting to Watch

Above the pyramid — floating over it like a decorative cloud — sits the board of directors. These are the supervisors. The adults in the room. The people whose sacred fiduciary duty is to oversee management on behalf of the shareholders.

Kroger’s board met nine times last year. The average outside director was paid about $324,000. That’s $36,000 a meeting. Per person. Albertsons: also nine meetings, average around $342,000, and a standard package of $125,000 in cash just for existing, plus $190,000 in stock. Walmart’s board convened five times.

Now, in fairness — and I’m told there must be some — directors do more than attend meetings. There are committees. There is reading. There are, one assumes, PDFs. But let’s apply the test I promised in Part 1: are they good at their jobs, or bad at their jobs?

Trick question. It doesn’t matter. The invoice is identical.

If the board is brilliant, you pay $3.5 million a year for it. If the board is a decorative panel of golf acquaintances, you pay $3.5 million a year for it. There is no refund window. And what have these boards recently supervised, for the money? Kroger’s board supervised a CEO out the door over conduct they won’t describe, then paid his temp triple. Albertsons’ board supervised a two-year, lawyer-drenched attempt to merge with Kroger that a judge shot dead in December 2024 — after which the two companies, these pillars of American grocery, began suing each other over a $600 million breakup fee, like a divorcing couple fighting over a timeshare neither one ever got to use. And while that smoked, Albertsons handed its executives retention bonuses — $1.35 to $2 million a head in cash — for staying at the company they had just failed to make into a different company.

Sit with that. In your job, if the big project craters, you update your résumé. In the club, if the big project craters, they pay you extra not to update your résumé. Failure, it turns out, is a retention risk. The successful executive might leave; the failed one must be begged to stay, at premium rates, presumably so he doesn’t take his failure to a competitor.

All of this — every fee, every retainer, every retention bonus — supervised these companies to net margins of one to two cents on the dollar. In a bad year, less than one. If I supervised your household to a 0.7 percent margin, you would not pay me $324,000. You would change the locks.

And yes — the jets are real. Kroger’s flight department dates to 1952. The company has owned airplanes for seventy-four years — which means Kroger owned a corporate air force two decades before it owned a barcode scanner. The first UPC ever scanned in a grocery store was 1974. Priorities are like receipts: they itemize themselves. Today the FAA registry shows Challenger 300s wearing Kroger’s name, and Walmart operates one of the largest corporate fleets in the world out of Rogers, Arkansas. The proxies dutifully disclose “personal use of company aircraft” in footnotes written in a font normally reserved for pharmaceutical side effects.

The Part Where I Finally Answer the Damn Question

Okay. Deep breath. This is the section the last draft of American discourse always skips — the segment where the cable host says “and it all ends up on YOUR grocery bill!” and then cuts to commercial without showing the wiring. I’m going to show the wiring. Three mechanisms. Actual plumbing, actual numbers.

Mechanism One: You don’t pay the executives. You pay what the executives build.

Here’s the number that matters, and it’s not anybody’s salary.

Kroger’s revenue last fiscal year: $147.6 billion. Kroger’s “operating, general and administrative” expense — OG&A, the cost of running the corporation and its stores, everything that isn’t the food itself: $28.3 billion. Nineteen point two cents of every dollar you hand them.

Let’s put that on your actual receipt. You do a $200 grocery run:

The seven named executives — all $46 million of them — cost you about six cents.
The entire board of directors costs you about half a cent.
The corporate-and-store overhead machine costs you $38.40.
Kroger’s net profit, in a good year, is around $3. Last year, closer to $1.40.

Six cents. Thirty-eight dollars and forty cents. That is the ratio nobody puts on television, because both political teams hate it. The left wants the six cents to be the story. The right wants the $38.40 to be sacred. Neither gets their wish, because here’s the actual relationship between the two numbers:

Executives are not a line item. Executives are the people who write the line items.

The $38.40 didn’t fall from space. Every dollar of it was proposed by a director, blessed by a VP, consolidated by an SVP, decked by an EVP, and approved in a meeting with a catered lunch. The thirteen officers, the division presidents, the VP of where-the-crackers-are — their salaries are the six cents, but their decisions are the thirty-eight dollars. The pyramid is small money that steers big money. Judging executives by their pay is like judging an architect by what he spent on pencils.

The corporation burns its CEO’s entire annual compensation in overhead every four and a half hours. The CEO is not the cost. The CEO is the author of the cost. And you, my friend, are the publisher.

Mechanism Two: You don’t pay one pyramid. You pay the whole dynasty — with a markup on each one.

Now it gets better, and by better I mean worse.

Everything in Mechanism One described one company. But your dollar doesn’t visit one company. Remember the tomato from Part 1 — the Broadway production? Every company your food passes through has its own pyramid. The seed company has one. The fertilizer company has one. The processor has one. The packaging company has one. The CPG brand has a magnificent one — the Cheerios people have a Chief Disruptive Growth Officer, and I promise you he is not working for free. The wholesaler has one. The broker has one. The retailer has one.

And here is the mechanism, the actual gear-train, so simple it’s almost insulting:

Each company prices its overhead into what it charges the next company. Then the next company applies its margin on top of that.

Kroger’s gross margin is about 23 percent — meaning roughly a 30 percent markup over what it paid. So every dollar of executive civilization already baked into the wholesale price — the brand’s marketing department, the broker’s commission, the processor’s C-suite retreat in Scottsdale — arrives on the shelf wearing an extra 30 cents. Upstream overhead doesn’t just pass through to you. It passes through and gains weight, like a rumor.

Economists have a name for this: double marginalization. Each layer in a chain stacks its markup on the previous layer’s markup, and the final price comes out higher than if one outfit ran the whole thing. The paper that formalized it was published in 1950. Which — dig this — is the same year British researchers published the landmark study linking cigarettes to lung cancer. Two great discoveries, same year. We put warning labels on one of them. The other one we put on your receipt.

Want to see how much civilization is riding in that wholesale price? CPG companies spend roughly 20 percent of their gross revenue on “trade promotion” — the fees, allowances, and payments they shovel at retailers for shelf position and displays. Global trade spend runs about half a trillion dollars a year. The FTC found that slotting fees — the toll a brand pays just to put a new product on the shelf — ran $1 million to $2 million for a single national launch. And here’s the punchline the industry tells on itself: by its own research, about 72 percent of trade promotions don’t break even. Nearly three-quarters of that money is set on fire by the professionals, on purpose, annually — and every dime of the bonfire is priced into wholesale, and then marked up 30 percent, and then handed to you at register six.

You are not just paying for marketing. You are paying retail markup on marketing that didn’t work.

Mechanism Three: The labor didn’t disappear. It got laundered.

This is the one I know from the inside, because I’ve spent my career in food and beverage, and I have watched it happen the way you watch a tide — too slow to film, impossible to stop.

Everybody’s terrified that AI is coming for the jobs. Someday. Maybe. Meanwhile, your supermarket already ran the entire experiment, decades ago, with no algorithm, no neural network, nothing but an org chart and a red pen. Forty years ago the store came with people in it. A greeter. A butcher who knew you. Stock clerks in every aisle. Baggers — an actual human being whose job was to pack your groceries so the bread didn’t die under the canned goods. Kids who carried the bags to your car, in the rain, for nothing, because it was included.

Gone. All of it. Today, nearly 40 percent of grocery checkout lanes are self-checkout — which is to say, you, working an unpaid shift as your own cashier, under a camera that suspects you, at a machine that accuses you of placing an unexpected item in the bagging area. The average grocery workweek has been ground down to 28.5 hours — a record low — because the schedule, too, has been optimized by someone three states away with “workforce” in their title.

So the store fired the labor, and the payroll savings flowed to your receipt as lower prices. Right?

You know it fucking didn’t. Here’s what actually happened, and this is the part they never explain because it’s genuinely hidden:

The shelf-stocking didn’t stop. It changed payrolls.

Walk any supermarket at 7 a.m. and look at who’s filling the shelves. A lot of them don’t work for the store. They’re vendor reps and broker reps — the beer distributor’s guy, the soda company’s guy, the chip company’s guy, the bread guy — doing “pack-out,” stocking their own product, because if they don’t, it sits in the back room, and nothing has ever been sold from a back room. The classic industry study found that direct-store-delivery products are about a quarter of grocery unit sales and over half of the store’s profits, and that supplier reps perform roughly one quarter of all store labor. One in four hands stocking that store is on somebody else’s payroll.

And where does that somebody get the money? From the brand. And where does the brand put the cost? Into the wholesale price. And what does the retailer do to the wholesale price? Say it with me: marks it up 30 percent.

Follow the bagger’s ghost through the machine: the store cut his job, moved the work upstream onto the vendor, the vendor priced it into the case cost, and the retailer then margined it back down to you with interest. The labor cost was never eliminated. It was laundered — run through two other companies until it came out clean, unrecognizable, and more expensive, tucked inside the price of the chips. You used to tip the kid who carried your bags. Now you pay retail markup on his replacement’s payroll, and the replacement works for a corporation you’ve never heard of.

Oh — you’ve never heard of it, but it has a ticker symbol. Advantage Solutions: a $3.5 billion publicly traded company whose product is doing the in-store work supermarkets used to do themselves. Merchandising, stocking, resets, demos. An entire Fortune-scale corporation made of outsourced grocery labor. And because it’s a corporation, it comes with — go ahead, guess — its own executive pyramid. Its own C-suite, its own board, its own proxy statement. Which is also priced into the wholesale case cost. Which is also marked up.

They didn’t just launder the bagger. They gave the laundromat a leadership team. And the leadership team has an experience officer. And you’re paying for the experience.

Thank you, Board of Directors. Thank you, CEO, COO, CFO, CPO, CMO. Thank you, EVPs, SVPs, GVPs, and the VP of Center Store Omnichannel Merchandising. The greeter says hi. He’d say it in person, but he’s been transformed.

The Ratchet, or: Why None of It Ever Comes Back

One more piece of wiring, and then I’ll let you go.

Two weeks ago — July 2026 — Albertsons announced it was consolidating eleven divisions into four. Just like that. Seven entire divisions, each presumably stuffed with presidents and VPs and directors, declared surplus in a single press release. Kroger, for its part, has cut roughly a thousand corporate jobs in three rounds inside a year, to — this is the official quote — “simplify the organization and refocus priorities that directly help the company run great stores.”

Two questions. First: if seven of your eleven divisions could vanish without the stores noticing, what were they doing? That’s not a rhetorical flourish — that’s an admission, in press-release form, that the pyramid carried seven divisions’ worth of dead weight, and you were paying freight on all of it, marked up, for years.

Second question: when they cut it — did your receipt go down?

Go check. I’ll wait. Take your time. Look for the line that says “CORPORATE SIMPLIFICATION CREDIT: –$4.17.”

It’s not there. It’s never there. Because overhead is a one-way valve. When costs go up anywhere in the chain, they pass through to you with the speed and certainty of a subpoena. When costs go down, the savings stop at the margin line and are escorted upstairs. That’s not a conspiracy — it’s just that nobody in the entire two-million-mile machine has the job of handing money back. Check the titles. There’s a Chief Growth Officer. There is no Chief Refund Officer. The org chart tells you everything: every noun on it points in one direction, and that direction is away from you.

So here’s the honest verdict, because I promised you honest math both ways:

Is the executive pyramid the reason chicken costs what it costs? No. Even the whole pyramid, salaries-wise, is small against the river of revenue — pennies on your cart, not dollars. Anyone who tells you the grocery bill is high because of executive pay is selling you a cartoon, and last time I established we don’t do cartoons here.

But is the pyramid on your receipt? It is now proven, Your Honor, three ways: you pay for the $28-billion-a-year machine the pyramid designs; you pay a compounding markup on every other pyramid your food passed through on the way to this one; and you pay retail-plus-margin for the laundered labor of every human being the pyramid removed from your shopping experience while telling you it was for your convenience.

It’s a big club. It has thirteen officers, a dozen division presidents, eleven directors at $36K a meeting, two Challenger 300s, and a Chief People Officer to handle the people the club is not in any meaningful sense for.

You’re not in it. You’re under it. It’s a pyramid — that’s where the weight goes.

Next time — Part 3: the middlemen. The processors and packers you’ve never heard of who touch your food more times than your own mother did, where four companies handle most of the beef in America, and where — unlike today’s episode — the concentration might actually be pinching you where you shop. Bring gloves. It gets greasy.

Cascadia Managing Brands

Part 2 of The $200 Grocery Bill: An Uncomfortable Look at Why American Food Costs So Much

The Membership Roster, As Legally Disclosed

The Nouns Have Taken Over

A Brief Deposition Regarding the COO

The Board: $36,000 a Meeting to Watch

The Part Where I Finally Answer the Damn Question

Mechanism One: You don’t pay the executives. You pay what the executives build.

Mechanism Two: You don’t pay one pyramid. You pay the whole dynasty — with a markup on each one.

Mechanism Three: The labor didn’t disappear. It got laundered.

The Ratchet, or: Why None of It Ever Comes Back

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The Million Dollar Grocery Store Club