Star Market, Times Supermarkets, and Longs Drugs

Hundreds of employees of Star Market expect to win employment with Times Supermarkets when the latter chain acquires the former in a few weeks. But two Star locations will close as Times flips them to Longs Drugs. The Ewa Beach and Moiliili locations of Star will close, which surprised me because I shop at the Moiliili location and thought it was a great supermarket. It also has a great location, and Longs has its own store just a couple blocks away on King St. Nonetheless, Star has issued the mandatory layoff notices to all the employees, and the ones at these two locations have received no indication from Longs that their services will be required. This reminds me of a time in my own past when the radio station for which I worked, an all-news radio outlet in Washington, D.C., was sold to new owners who dropped the news format and laid off the air staff. The incoming owner said he did not plan to make any immediate changes, which some of us naively thought to mean he might keep the news format. So the station changed hands and we all kept our jobs... for a few weeks. When the format changed - it signed off one night as a news station and signed back on the next morning playing contemporary music - the former owner said our severance would be paid by the new owner, and the new owner said our severance would be paid by the old owner. No one ever paid any severance. Perhaps they thought this was funny. For me, with no savings after working for about $200 a week (this was 1977) and driving a car that was held together by its bumper stickers, it fell slightly short of being hilarious, but maybe my sense of humor is insufficiently developed.

Comments

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If Longs takes over the Moilili Star,at least they won't have one of the worst parking lots in town anymore. That King st lot has always been bad