SUPER SAVER TO CLOSE 25 STORES

ELLIOT ZWIEBACH

BOISE, Idaho - Albertsons LLC, the portion of the locally based company sold to a group of investors headed by Cerberus Capital Management, New York, said last week it plans to close 25 of its 27 Super Saver stores by early August.

They join 100 Albertsons-banner stores that were put up for sale a week earlier.

The Super Saver closings will affect 11 stores in Texas, 11 in Florida and three in Louisiana. The other two Super Savers, in Utah, are being transferred to the LLC division, spokeswoman Chris Wilcox said, though she declined to say why those two were being kept open.

The Super Saver stores were operated separately from Albertsons through Extreme Inc., an Albertsons subsidiary created in mid-2004 as a way to utilize underperforming stores. The stores carried 50%-60% of the SKUs of a traditional Albertsons and featured limited service departments.

The company is trying to place the 14 employees who worked at the Extreme offices here with either the Supervalu-owned Albertsons organization or the LLC group.