So, I’m looking at the last quarterly report from safeway… and I’ll admit that finance isn’t my thing, so I might be reading this wrong… But their total stockholder’s equity (which is their total worth after liquidating everything and paying off debts) is 4.266 billion dollars… Sounds great, right? Why can’t they take some of that and pay for employee health care?

Cause employees need somewhere to work…

12.924 billion of their assets is property… You can’t sell off all your stores and keep paying your employees… Not for long, anyway… But they’ve got 11.136 bil in liabilities to pay off somehow… sure, only 3.641 bil of that is current debt and the rest is long term debt, but still… can’t go missing too many minimum payments without pissing off your credit card company.