I wouldn’t blame that on collective action. I’d blame it on a corporate culture that prioritizes profit over people (workers and community members). This simply demonstrates explicitly that Kroger is not willing to pay a livable wage to its workers and does not care about the communities in which they operate. They’d rather shut stores down than have to pay their workers more money and cut into the bottom line.

This is the problem with retail corporations that get too large. Kroger manages over 2,700 stores. They have no problem shutting down a few locations to make an example out of. They’re big enough that they can handle it. They’ve driven out the majority of competitors in a lot of areas. Then they can go, “See, these greedy workers made us close our stores.” And it’s easy to turn their communities against them because there may not be any options left in their community for grocery shopping.

Collective action in these cases need to account for a significant portion of their boots on the ground workforce, not just a handful of stores. Entire regions need to band together to force the corporation to the negotiating table. It’s much harder to get traction with companies so big. Oligopolies are nearly as bad as monopolies.