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E-mail StoryVons on White Lane closing
| Wednesday, May 21 2008 5:33 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, May 22 2008 11:10 AM
The Vons supermarket on White Lane is scheduled to close June 1, a spokeswoman for the owner confirmed Wednesday.
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It is being shut down and all employees there are being offered jobs at nearby Vons locations because that store “is not performing up to our expectations,” spokeswoman Teena Massingill said.
“We’ve been working on trying to maximize the performance of this store for quite a while,” she said. “When it became obvious that ... we were not successful, then we began the plans to close the store.”
Located at 2100 White Lane, between Hughes Lane and H Street, the 65,000-square-foot store opened in 1995. It employs 55 workers, down from 74 in early December.
A representative of the union that represents bakers at that store, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Brandy Sparks, 26, wasn’t surprised to hear the news.
“I came in here a week ago and they didn’t have any milk, so I asked them if they were closing and they said ‘no,’” she said.
Sparks and her husband Mike, 27, said they’ll just shop at the next closest grocer, a Food 4 Less.
“It (the Food 4 Less) is a lot nicer than it used to be. They’ve fixed it up,” he said. “We hardly came here, anyway. Just when we were in a hurry. It’s overpriced.”
Clifford Tate, 80, was a little annoyed, saying there wasn’t another grocery store of the same caliber nearby, but shrugged.
“Business is business,” he said. “If they aren’t making what they need to make, I can certainly understand it.”
Vons informed the Kern County Board of Supervisors late last year that the store would close by the end of January. A company spokesman said at the time that no decision to close had been made, and that the notice was filed only because closure was a possibility.
Then in March, another Vons spokesman said no decision had been made to close the store, adding that the location’s next performance review was set for June.
Vons Cos. Inc. has six other stores in Bakersfield and Oildale.
The chain is based in Arcadia and owned by Safeway Inc., which is headquartered in Pleasanton. Safeway is the second-largest grocery store chain in the country.