The move has irritated South Gate shoppers, who say they have a limited selection of grocery stores.
"They are taking the only full-service supermarket in our city of 100,000, getting rid of all the high-end items and turning it into a low-end store," said Carol Pavon, who protested the change to store managers on a recent shopping trip.
"They assume that we will go to the Downey Albertsons instead, but that's an inconvenience," she said.
Nationwide, Supervalu plans to close about 50 stores. It also will open fewer stores and scale back on remodeling stores to save money.
For the quarter ended Nov. 29, Supervalu posted a loss of $2.94 billion compared with a profit of $141 million in the same period a year earlier. Sales fell to $10.17 billion from $10.21 billion.
The company is forecasting that its same-store sales, an important measure of a retailer's health, will decline 1% during its 2009 fiscal year.
Vons, owned by Safeway Inc. of Pleasanton, is slashing jobs and reducing hours as part of a "right-sizing" program, said spokesman Daymond Rice.
"It is very common to reexamine your labor needs in the post-holiday season and staff accordingly," Rice said.
Besides the 97 layoffs, Rice said, Vons has reduced 171 full-time employees to part-time status.
Vons has 297 stores and about 21,000 union employees.
"We believe it is possible that many of those employees may regain hours throughout the course of the year," Rice said.
Full-time workers are guaranteed 40 hours a week, but part-timers can be sliced back to 24 hours, which union official Conger called a "significant" earnings cut.
At Ralphs, all but a few of the demoted meat cutters decided to accept the lower pay to stay employed, said Kendra Doyel, spokeswoman for Ralphs Grocery Co., which has 260 stores and about 22,000 workers. It is part of Kroger Co., the nation's largest grocer.
"We have closed a number of stores over the last few years and absorbed the employees, but we were heavy in the meat department, and because of the economy, we haven't had the attrition that could have balanced out the staffing," Doyel said. She said the demotions were based on seniority.
Of the three, Kroger is doing the best job of navigating the recession, said Wolf, the analyst. Its same-store sales are running slightly ahead of the inflation rate, whereas Safeway and Supervalu are either lagging behind inflation or have turned negative, he said.
