Every big grocery merger of the last twenty years got argued the same way.
Bigger buys cheaper. Cheaper wins. Scale is the whole game.
The Federal Trade Commission does not measure it that way.
When the government sued to block Kroger from buying Albertsons, it did not draw one national map. It drew a few miles around each store door, hundreds of times over.
That small map is the one a Cleveland family grocer has been playing on since 1929.
Heinen’s never sold. Twenty-three stores today. Eighteen in Northeast Ohio, five outside Chicago.
So the headline question has a short answer: they stayed independent because the thing being consolidated was never the thing they were selling.
The interesting part is what that bet costs now.