A notable sight in one of the public records we check daily for possible news is the list of liquor license applications in King County, which is often the first place a new business or the new owner of an existing business shows up. Since last week, we noticed a flood of applications for certain stores across the county, primarily QFCs and Safeways, to transfer their licenses to businesses with 1918 Winterstrasse in their names. This is a unit of C&S Food Wholesalethe third party to whom more than 400 stores are to be sold if the Kroger-Albertsons Merger goes through. The proposed license transfers have been popping up in batches in daily reports; today we saw for the first time one of the local businesses that are part of the potential deal, according to the list we published last month: Westwood Village QFC and Admiral Safeway are now on the license transfer list (the third local business offered for sale to C&S is the Junction QFC). The license filings have no commercial significance at this time, but are noteworthy nonetheless. We checked with C&S again to make sure they are not closing the deal before the merger, and the spokesperson Lauren LaBruno replied: “The transaction is not final and C&S’s approval is contingent upon Kroger and Albertsons resolving the pending cases in court.” The latest court case is a counter-offensive by Kroger to Federal Trade Commission‘s review of the merger.
