Albertsons now offers financial wellness benefits, including earned wage access

Albertsons Companies, the grocery chain that owns stores including Safeway, Shaws, and Jewel-Osco, recently announced its rolling out financial wellness benefits to its 280,000-person workforce.

The new suite of benefits, offered through a partnership with the financial well-being vendor Stream, includes earned-wage access (EWA). Though other employers in the grocery sector already offer benefits that allow employees to access their paychecks early, this is the first time Albertsons is doing so.

In addition to EWA, Stream’s platform also includes tools to track and budget earnings, build emergency savings, and gain insight into both short- and long-term financial planning.

“We know that building financial resilience goes beyond just a paycheck, and we’re excited that so many of our associates are already using Stream’s tools to plan for their futures,” Jennifer Weinstein, Albertsons’s VP of benefits, said in a July 28 press release.

Beyond EWA. Stream, which first launched under the name Wagestream in the UK in 2018, primarily works with companies employing between 5,000 and 10,000 workers, predominantly in hourly roles, according to co-founder Portman Wills.

Wills said Stream approached Albertsons as “an employer of choice that we felt like shared our values and ethos.” He observed that even as Albertsons has grown through acquisitions, such as its purchase of Safeway in 2015, the company appears to have maintained “a layer of employee well-being and…employment standards” across its workforce.

While Stream first launched as an EWA provider, Wills said the company expanded its offerings after realizing “earned wage access alone isn’t really enough to solve people’s problems.”

A number of employers in the grocery sector, including Kroger and Lidl US, already offer EWA to their employees. Wills said he believed Albertsons had held off on an EWA benefit up until now because they were wary of products “without the financial education underpinning.”

In recent years, workers at major grocery chains have been acutely impacted by rising prices on the shelves of their own stores. The Guardian spoke with employees of both Kroger and Albertsons in 2024 on news of a proposed merger between the two grocery chains that was ultimately scrapped. Employees who spoke to the outlet expressed concerns that their wages and hours weren’t sufficient to keep up with inflation.

Amid such financial stress, an obvious solution may be to raise workers’ wages. But Wills said this isn’t always possible for employers like Albertsons. If a business can raise every employee’s wages by $1 an hour, for example, they might ask, “what other things can I do to invest in my workforce?” and look to platforms like Stream.

Initial statistics shared by Albertsons indicate the Stream benefit has been received positively by the workforce, with a survey fielded 90 days after users joined the platform showing 87% of them felt more in control of their money, and 84% felt better at managing their finances.