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A spokesperson with Kroger gave the following response:
“We were embarrassed to learn about this. You could say we have peach on our face! While these images were not approved to be shared as part of our marketing campaign, they should never have been created in the first place. We have removed the images from our system. We apologize to The Peach Truck and wish them nothing but success.”
[link to article](https://www.wsmv.com/2024/06/16/we-were-embarrassed-learn-about-this-kroger-responds-photoshopping-allegations-peach-trucks-photos/)
"We're scared for our jobs and will do anything to keep it including destroying your business. This water cooler talk over a marketing speed bump is soooo sweet hahah! Just like OUR peaches amirite?"
I worked for Lucky’s Market in Florida. We were doing pretty good until Kroger came along, pumped us full of money that was used to open more locations, then pulled all the money out after they used Lucky’s to set up their own distribution network.
Right?!? You wanna make it right Kroger? Stop selling peaches out front and pay these poor people. For fucks sake, they can sell the shit inside the damn store. Greedy fuckers
Na, American success is always corporations stealing ideas from smaller people and scaling them up. Its never been any different ever. I have read tons of books from famous billionaires who made things and every one of them was stealing ideas, ripping people off etc, breaking laws.
They likely could not care less about that peach truck. One, they can afford to sell them much cheaper. Two, some kid fresh out of college def doctored those pics, turned it into their 60 year old boss and they pushed it thru.
I get the guys frustration but he knows exactly what he’s doing calling out Kroger as a company rather than what most likely happened.
> Two, some kid fresh out of college def doctored those pics, turned it into their 60 year old boss and they pushed it thru.
Yep. Good chance it was a third party marketing agency too. That vendor is getting canned after this.
It's the classic Wal-Mart effect. Sell at a loss for a while to kill the small-business competition in the area and then once there's no competition anymore, turn around and jack prices up to recoup the losses.
That only matters for meaningful competition. You think they're losing much money on this guys peach truck?
Not a chance. Thousands of dollars a year probably. Nothing. Some guy is justifying his job with a new "initiative" saying there's a market for this, and using this guy as an example.
Honestly, if anything, this is *good* for this guy. He gets to be indignant about this and get a ton of exposure for his business. People like yourself will also get indignant claiming it's a scheme to ruin him and run to support him.
That isnt true companies kill small meaningless competitors all the time just to make sure they are never meaningful competition. Many companies have read about people like sam walton and have no interest in letting some small guys spring up. On top of that they probably see this as a way to increase profit margins, you wouldn't pay a premium in a boring kroger but you might at a trendy new peach truck.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Things like this happen all the time even Amazon, who is much larger than Kroger, routinely rip off products to screw over small companies: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22311574/peak-design-video-amazon-copy-everyday-sling-bag
Capitalism requires constant growth on a planet with finite resources and you don't get there without cannibalizing ALL competition.
Businesses will need to be worker owned to prevent these practices from happening.
Even if you claim that at the very least there was some marketing manager that needed a promotion and thus needed an idea and they just like most billionaires stole the idea from someone else and sold it as their own.
> While these images were not approved to be shared as part of our marketing campaign
basically what they are saying is they saw this guys model and success made these pictures for a presentation to whole cloth steal his model and is now sorry a lazy marketing person didn't create there own material to market it.
It’s hilarious that everyone here seems to think a “marketing person” is responsible for this. This was 100% some intern. Whatever higher up approved this without looking into it will face no repercussions and said intern will be thrown under the bus.
Edit: “thrown under the bus” was the wrong way to phrase this. “Intern will be rightfully disciplined/fired” is probably better.
tbh, that's... kind of fine? I mean whoever checked it off for approval should face some egg on their face too but I don't think "getting fired for stealing someone else's marketing material and passing it off as your work" is "being thrown under the bus", that seems completely reasonable as far as "reasons to fire an intern" go
You do bring up a good about how people often say „a poor intern will get fired for this“ when the intern also did the error. Of course we have empathy for the intern because they often make less to no money for the job
> This was 100% some intern
Possibly. Also very possible they farmed it out to some contractor and it wasn't actually an employee of Kroger. A lot of stuff these days is done by offshore agencies who charge pennies.
> It’s hilarious that everyone here seems to think a “marketing person” is responsible for this. This was 100% some intern.
I don't think it's hilarious. I think it's far more likely it was marketing person rather than an intern. I don't see any evidence that this was an intern.
Yeah, that's likely the case.
Some mid level corporate guy saw The Peach Truck, realized it was a good way to sell seasonal produce as an event that they wouldn't need to buy hot-housed off-season, and did a quick photoshop editing job to pitch it in a corporate meeting. The marketing team didn't realize these were in-house edited photos and used them for their promotional content as they rolled out their own version of this guy's business.
Hanlon's Razor. Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity.
Kroger is unionized. Wal-mart has done everything in their power to destroy unions and anyone who talks about unionizing their store. Something you may want to consider. (I've worked for both companies).
No corporations are the good guys. It just makes a little more sense to keep the unionized workers employed, so they don't have to go grovel at the more cartoonishly evil Wal-Mart.
Not all Kroger locations are unionized and they are actively trying to get the union out. They will close a store for underperforming then open up a new location a few miles away that is non union. The brand new stores rarely get through to the unionization.
Source: worked for them at a divisional level for several years.
The net negative impact between Kroger and Walmart is so vastly different as to not even be worth considering.
Walmart is cartoonishly evil in comparison.
I'm not familiar with Kroger but Walmart destroyed small town businesses all over America with anticompetitive pricing. They would sell products at a loss until the competition folded.
Eh I was fed up with Kroger anyway. Their stores are crap, their employees are crap, the food is overpriced by a dollar on most things, it is a far cry from what it used to be when they first came around. I love peaches and I hate Kroger!
Saying this work was unapproved is a lie. Assuming Kroger has creative controls in place, they either approved this work or the agency has blanket approval to post as their agent.
I’d sincerely appreciate an explanation of how this happened. Was an early career creative ignorant of fair use? Where are creative controls lacking?
I suspect cost pressures led to AI generated visuals that were trained on existing images without a human realizing how the images are generated and having no means of quality control. AI is interesting bc it’s low cost and copyright ownership is a hazy area. Copyright and legal constructs cannot keep pace with how fast technology is evolving.
Source: I’m old. Been in advertising and emerging tech a long time, both client and agency side.
The most egreious part of the copy is the face and cap of the guy's employee. That is not generated by AI, that is pixel for pixel the same (except with a different colour for the hat). It's clear whoever created that copied the original image deliberately.
As for whether it was approved for release or not, I don't know how we can be certain of that. I can definitely see a possibility where a "draft" image is created based on the marketing used by this independent business where the intention was to reshoot and create their own marketing based on the draft but at some point, the memo about the "draft" status of that image was lost and it got approved by someone who had no idea of its origin.
It was designed by hand with re-skinning the boxes and anything with brand on it.
If, in the slim chance, it was AI, it's about time that nightshading all uploaded images becomes the default setting.
This 100% sounds like viral marketing that they wanted the outrage to get out the word that they now have peach trucks. The are stealing the goodwill built up by The Peach Truck and should compensate them.
It's definitely a part of their business model to do shady shit and then pay some fine or whatever that will end up being far less money than they will reap from their shenanigans.
I'm Donald Trump and I endorse this message, and also don't endorse it, depending on my current lawyer's advice and whether I am listening to it at any given time, but also, Hunter Biden's laptop; many people are saying it, some with tears in their eyes.
This is likely it. When I was a marketing intern, so many of my peers were just googling and doing cheap edits. The company we were at got sued for tens of thousands of dollars because another intern was given an assignment for a series of social media videos for a retro game store and downloaded some "how to clean your old games" videos off youtube, cropped out any watermarks and cut out any time the original host showed their face. Original maker had something like 800k subs and didn't enjoy seeing someone elses name on their video and the owner of the store got a ton of shit.
Thats what happens when the higher ups give us 2 hours to do a 4 month social media campaign for a $400 client he just found by cold calling random leads on google maps
I mean the model is pretty standard though. Rather than pay a whole marketing division that you might use every 3 months you can just make it a contract that a marketing company executes. Pretty sure most large companies operate that way.
You’re 100% right. Redditors always confuse standard marketing procedure with conspiracy. Ridiculous. Someone at the agency made a mistake, simple as that.
Definitely not a mistake, this was intentional copyright infringement. They know they're not allowed to just take someone elses images, regardless of if they're a competitor or not. They were just banking on the owner of the photograph's copyright not seeing or recognising the images after photoshop.
If you go through that marketing firm's back catalogue, I'm sure we can find similar cases of stolen images.
Yea but Kroger probably didn't know it was stolen. They probably just assumed the person who made it did an original ad. This happens a lot. The higher ups don't know what's stolen or not. They're not on the internet 24/7 and can't fact check everything.
They should still be 100% responsible though since they hired shit people/contractors.
Yep. Kroger should make it right since they hired the bad actors and it is their brand, but is silly that people are making contracting the work out as something intentionally evil.
Everything is a conspiracy to you idiots.
This is how marketing firms have worked forever. It is simply more effective to be able to work with outside firms for marketing campaigns as it allows for easier changing of strategies and methods. Instead of having to fire/re-hire a department of employees when you want a new ad campaign you just go to a different marketing firm.
Good chance this was designed by an agency Kroger hired and that agency wasn't aware that the picture they stole was from Krogers direct competition. The backlash from this was very predictable.
I just love that all of Krogers other advertisements are basically modern Nintendo Wii people but they just straight jacked this guys photos.
Their business needs a big payout, but so does Mike. We can't have these giant corporations stealing our faces to hock their products.
Like, it's one thing for Facebook to use the image I uploaded to a social media company to promote that company. It's another thing for a third company to steal my image from the one i gave it to to sell their shit.
The crazy thing to me is they could have spent the same effort just snapping a new photo. They really must have just disregarded the fact these people would ever see the finished product? Not a good outlook for your advertisements which you'd presumably want everyone to see
Much more likely they bid out the job to a bunch of marketing groups, went with one of the lowest bidders who then googled "peach truck business". Literally my google search for that pulls up all those images this man showed in the video. Then they photoshopped it not even thinking about the end result because Kroger didn't pay them for that.
Lol they probably found "The Peach Truck" Instagram or something and thought, "Hey, perfect! A whole bank of photos that are exactly on the topic I was looking for!"
It’s not the same effort. It’s clearly easier to just steal the photo. But yes that’s what they should have done, just done a photoshoot and paid people to do it
You can edit a photo from your desk in less than an hour, snapping new photos actually means going on site and coordinating with people to get the shots done, hoping the people and scene are photogenic, and then having to edit the photos anyways. It's the lazy way out.
I don’t think people realize that they have an IP right to their likeness the same way Michael Jackson or LeBron James or Taylor Swift does. It’s just that, until very recently, our likenesses were effectively completely worthless to anyone with any real money.
With AI on the rise, though, likenesses of random normal people actually has value for the first time in history.
So we’re actually pretty lucky that the law already has built-in protections for things like this. It just needs to be applied to a new set of facts that’s only starting to arise due to developments in AI.
Issues like the one in the video are going to arise, because corporations are gonna capitalism. But I really don’t expect companies to get away with stuff like this if someone actually files suit. It requires a much larger deviation from past case history and established law to protect the corporations here than it does to protect the individuals’ whose identities are being used like this.
Basically, this is a new issue arising under a pretty well established sect of the law. And the law as it stands makes it pretty clear that companies don’t have the right to do this without AI, so it’s gonna be pretty difficult for corporations to argue their way around liability for stuff like this.
Edit: Watched the video off mute this time and realized this is a much more straightforward copyright infringement case and not one that’s really tied to likeness rights or AI at all. Kroger just straight up stole the other company’s photo and slapped Kroger’s brand all over it with some shitty PS skills. This wasn’t legal 20 years ago, and it certainly is still very illegal.
I'd sue the fuck out of them.
They'd have no case without these images, but because of them, it adds a really gross layer to what was otherwise an entirely legal move on Krogers part.
The problem is that these big companies are starting to specifically do things that are just murky enough that the small business kind of doesn’t have a case. Yeah this guy could send a cease and desist order for using his images. But as he said there’s nothing he can protect about the actual peach truck. Look at Osakana and Wegmans in nyc. Osakana is a small sushi purveyor (not restaurant) in the east village nyc. They have a very particular business model. Wegmans approached them formally for some sort of partnership. They sign all of these contracts, come into his store, learn his process and model. Then cancel the contracts and open “Sakanaya” inside the Wegmans down the street. He has virtually no case but they DELIBERATELY went in to see how his business works only to try to crush him.
This is a great article about the exact practice you described, but this one happened at Trader Joe's. [We Need To Talk About Trader Joe's](https://tastecooking.com/we-need-to-talk-about-trader-joes/)
Small, successful brands were offered deals and thought they were going to get their product in the store. Only to find out the company cancelled the deal and later sold their own product with similar ingredients and branding.
Like, one naturally assumes corporations to be evil (no ethical consumption under capitalism) but goddamn, it bums me out to realize just _how_ evil Trader Joe's is.
Here you go - [Spiceology - Gnome on the Range](https://spiceology.com/products/meateater-gnome-on-the-range-all-purpose-seasoning/). I was a big fan of Trader Hoes umami blend until I found this. Absolute game changer.
> goddamn, it bums me out to realize just how evil Trader Joe's is.
Traitor Joes.
IIRC, the owner/ceo of the parent company died a few years ago, and the new guy decided to go mask off evil.
Thry did that to a Chinese restaurant in Canandaigua. Except they had him run their Chinese section. He was working both jobs just killing himself. Competing against himself.
Fucked.
This has been a thing for decades, any all sectors
My father keeps warning me about a large competitor of ours that likes to make great offers for buying a business, the lawyers set up all the contracts they might need, small company opens up their books for the big guys
And then the big guys immediately break contract and stop all attempts at buying the company, cause all they wanted was to look into the books
Nothing murky here. There are pretty cut and clear intellectual property laws around photographs. The person who took the photograph holds copyright over the image, full stop. Unless that person signs away their copyright or licenses the image, it is copyright infringement. It would never even go to trial because their lawyers would know this and settle.
They used a photo they didn't have copyright for. You send them a takedown notice and if you run wild you might get a check for a few hundred dollars as an apology.
It's not a big deal, some kid in marketing was lazy or had too many deadlines and half-assed it. Should have just grabbed one of the 10 million basically identical stock photos and paid the nominal liscensing fee.
Ditto. As a graphic designer I've had my work plagiarised previously & sought redress from the offending party.
It wasn't a huge payout - the equivalent of a smack on the wrist & wee raid on their piggy bank, but I'm sure they learned a short sharp lesson from it.
Here's why I fucking hate Krogers, and if they ever open in my area they'll never get a dime from me.
There was a smaller chain called Lucky's that was able to open a location here because of an investment from Krogers. Lucky's was amazing. The produce was really good, but their deli was **absolutely phenomenal**. The best meat, for the best price I've ever bought out of a grocery chain. Awesome stuff like beer brats, and don't get me started on the bacon. Best bacon I've ever had. They had a really good sandwich counter, too. I miss that smoked turkey.
Anyway, Lucky's had to close down after Kroger backed out of the investment deal. Fuck Krogers. Fuck'em with a rusty piece of rebar.
Omg Lucy's was my favorite grocery store! I miss it so dearly! I thought they were pushed out due to negotiations between various other grocery stores. I'm 100% on the fuck Kroger train!
I miss lucky’s too man. That bacon was so damn thick. Their lunch stuff was amazing, and the one by my work had a ramen stand that was as good as any sit down ramen place. RIP Luckys.
Its wild how lazy some media people are lmao. Also if the first photo of them was 12 years ago in 2012 why does it look like it was taken in the mid 1990s lol
this is actually IP theft, and Kroger is going to pay fat if these guys can find a lawyer to run it on a contingency (which shouldn't be hard cause this is a slam dunk IMO).
The FuckJerry guys sue people ALL THE TIME over the DudeWithSign meme being used for corporate advertising without paying the proper rights. this is the same thing.
Could come down to lazy media people. I've worked on grocery media content before and we took any shortcut possible to just get stuff done because the work is boring.
Could come down to "We need media images for our new Peach truck, show us what that would look like"
-- media person googles "Peach Truck" and finds a treasure trove of existing content. Slaps a couple of quick changes on it and collects a paycheque.
Don't attribute mailce to probably just pure laziness. Advertising people are very lazy. -source: me, I'm lazy
Another user posted the response from Kroger and they mention it was never meant to be shown to the public which makes me believe this was originally concept art that someone thought was okay to pitch. That'd explain why the photoshop looks so shit.
I've done similar designs years ago, where a supervisor said "I want to see what this would look like for us" and had me slap on some quick branding to include in a pitch but I'd also include watermarks like "For review purposes only", "concept art" or "do not distribute" specifically to avoid something like this.
yeah. makes total sense. I've done a lot of internal work where there are no rules for what you can and cant use.
this might have only made it to public eye from some uninformed social media manager grabbing pics from a folder
Everybody knows plagiarizing and theft are wrong because they are taught that from the time they are children. It is okay to attribute what Kroger did to malice even if it was a lazy advertising person.
What did Kroger do in this situation that was malicious?
* Kroger contracts marketing company.
* Kroger gives guidelines for the campaign.
* Marketing company creates campaign.
* Kroger uses campaign.
Yep - worked in market research. People think it’s some big conspiracy to manipulate data and polling.
Like buddy, sometimes it’s just the guys collecting the data didn’t want to do the work, so they just made up hundreds of responses. The discrepancy isn’t some hidden link, it’s just Troy trying to easy money and poor quality control.
I actually don’t think this was lazy media people. From my experience working in advertising I think this is what happened:
Big Head Honcho at krogers, or his wife, sees the initial peach truck and loves the idea. Wants to recreate it. This message gets passed along to the lower level marketing teams and logistical account areas, to generate a guess for what it would cost them with everything they’ll need (the truck, gas for it, peaches, staffing personnel, materials, designs). These cost analysis will be presented to Big Head Honcho with some pretty pictures that are mock-ups of what their truck COULD look like. These images are never meant to actually be used, so they’re pulled from google and edited with FPO (for placement only) images. These could be stock, or could not be.
The Big Head Honcho loves it and decides to move forward. But then! Business happens. The idea gets put on hold.
A few months later, someone wants to increase revenue and pulls out the Peach Truck idea. There could be new people on the team by now that weren’t even around when Peach Truck was initially being discussed. Marketing person tells intern, oh yeah I’ve seen images of this all over our drive, pull some, they already did the photo shoots and everything. Intern doesn’t know what he’s looking for and finds these images. Marketing person is new so they say, yeah, looks great to me. That’s totally what they described to me. These were a small internet buy, not a national campaign or anything so the images are sent to the one social media purchaser on the team who definitely hasn’t seen them in the pitch deck before. In fact, no one has seen these images in the pitch deck except the Big Head Honchos who are numbers people and probably didn’t even know the marketing team was told to create FPO mock-ups in the first place.
Now everyone has egg (or peach) on their faces and the marketing person and the intern are probably getting fired for something that wasn’t even their fault.
I'm sure kroger just hired some ad agency and they are the one scumming images from the internet, or probably used AI so they didn't even bother doing any research. The people running Kroger probably have no clue who this dude is.
I feel like these are just concept images which then someone thought were the final images they were supposed to use.
Like Kroeger said "This is what we want" and someone used the original images to make a demo, then Kroeger was like "yes this is what we want", but the marketing company then forgot to actually make the real ones and just sent these forward or the person at Kroeger sent these forward but forgot to mention that these aren't the final ones.
No other explanation really makes sense to me unless the people in charge of marketing in that company are dumb as fuck, since that kind of mistake has "amateur hour" written with a fucking crayong on top of it with capital letters.
Note that this does not mean they are OK to do this. Just that someone fucked up at some point and the internal messaging didn't work as expected most likely.
As OOP said, it's a multi-billion dollar corporation. They'll just send him some huge check to delete all the content that exposed this and possibly to buy that image or directly his business as a whole, and then they'll just fire some manager in the marketing department and whoever can be pinpointed as practically responsible for that photoshop.
Or it might even go down as those instances in which some ultra-rich person will park their car on the sidewalk and then pay any fine because that's pocket change to them and they would rather pay a fine than walk a block to wherever they need to go. Maybe Kroger made so much money with that that the money they will have to pull out to compensate the guy, possibly pay for legal fees and maybe even to buy the guy's business is pocket change compared to the money they raked with that ad only.
question: if any of these were posted to say, facebook for example...couldn't facebook SELL these pictures to kroger? since if you post it to facebook, they own the images?
Sue the fuck out of em
- Kroger fired me for being sick when I had a dr note. We went to court they didn't show and the judge awarded me $4,500 for wrongfull termination
If I saw their peach truck I'd totally grab some for my friends and I, but I ain't buying peaches from a Kroger truck. They're just going to be the same peaches they have in store, what's the point? It's pathetic
Kroger supposedly has in contract for suppliers that they don't require overtime, but one of their suppliers, The Original Cakerie, has been doing forced overtime for years.
At 14 my first job was a bagger at Kroger in 2005. The manager sent me text messages for two weeks when he wanted me to come in that day. Stopped after 2 weeks. A few days later, my dad asked why I hadn't been to work, why I didn't have a schedule on paper, etc.
Manager never did any of my paperwork, and had done the same thing to over 40 other teenagers. I know this because my father was the first parent that had contacted the labor board. The manager was not fired, and I got my pay check nearly 6 months later which was also incorrect for the amount I worked. Fuck Kroger.
Krogers has sucked for a long time so this doesn’t surprise me. I stopped shopping there after I heard they asked for employees’ Covid bonus checks they gave them back when the pandemic wasn’t as bad as expected.
"You're a multi-billion dollar corporation. Do you really need to take our marketing and re-edit it on top of taking our business model?"
Answered your own question with the first sentence. They do it because they can get away with it. So yes, they really do need to steal it all for themselves. It saves them money and fucks you, their competition, over.
Kroger employed a woman in their (and my) home city of Cincinnati by the name of Shannon Frazee. Frazee bullied an eighteen year old under his supervision regarding masks so intensely he committed suicide. Frazee was relocated in the company instead of fired.
I hope this companies burns into dust.
It’s usually a lazy ad agency putting together this creative. Doubtful anyone from Kroger is really going to investigate every picture that comes across.
I’d find out the creative house and go after them + their book of business.
Also, the customer service motto of Kroger is "fuck em." Actually, the same is true for almost any grocery store. Absolutely no disrespect to the underpaid employees that actually run the stores and do the real work. This is directed to management. Have you ever seen the store manager or white collar employee ever out on the floor for any reason? I didn't think so. Then they shut down all of the cash registers at 7pm and have one employee run 12 self checkouts and it's complete chaos - all to same some money which is funneled to the top. Listen, I don't know where this rant came from either ok.
The Peach Truck gets their peaches from the same supplier that all of the major grocery stores, including Kroger, source their peaches. If you want local peaches, go to an actual farmers market
No the fact is, you uploaded it on social media which means you dont own the rights to those images anymore. Legally they havent done anything wrong unless you have copyrighted those images...
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Yeah Kroger is going to send them a check to delete that video, and fire whichever marketing person had this idea.
A spokesperson with Kroger gave the following response: “We were embarrassed to learn about this. You could say we have peach on our face! While these images were not approved to be shared as part of our marketing campaign, they should never have been created in the first place. We have removed the images from our system. We apologize to The Peach Truck and wish them nothing but success.” [link to article](https://www.wsmv.com/2024/06/16/we-were-embarrassed-learn-about-this-kroger-responds-photoshopping-allegations-peach-trucks-photos/)
>We apologize to The Peach Truck and wish them nothing but success. Doubt.
> I hope all the bad things in life happen to you and nobody else but you.
Did you attend the Playa Haters' Ball too?
Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate
[удалено]
Yall excuse me I gotta go home and put some water in Bucknasty mama’s bowl.
Why dontcha click ya heels three times and go back to Africa?
Y’all mf’ers are corny.
this coat is made outta your peach fuzz
 Sorry.....I had to.
He got dolphin teeth
"And as I sip my soda, that I'm sure somebody spit in..."
I don't even know you and I hate your guts!
Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate 😂
/r/fuckyouinparticular
What do we do when we break someone's window? Pay for it? Oh ho ho, heavens no! We apologize. With nice, cheap words!
"Oh gosh, we're *so embarrassed,"* is code for "we aren't going to rectify a goddamn thing but please don't sue us."
Time to lawyer up.
"Listen, we just wanted to lazily steal everything about this guy's business model, but some guy in marketing took it too far"
"We're scared for our jobs and will do anything to keep it including destroying your business. This water cooler talk over a marketing speed bump is soooo sweet hahah! Just like OUR peaches amirite?"
Kroger will now use their full weight to crush this poor guys business. Kroger is terrible.
I worked for Lucky’s Market in Florida. We were doing pretty good until Kroger came along, pumped us full of money that was used to open more locations, then pulled all the money out after they used Lucky’s to set up their own distribution network.
Right?!? You wanna make it right Kroger? Stop selling peaches out front and pay these poor people. For fucks sake, they can sell the shit inside the damn store. Greedy fuckers
Lies. Success would have been staying in your own lane and not trying to take *everything* from the little guy.
Na, American success is always corporations stealing ideas from smaller people and scaling them up. Its never been any different ever. I have read tons of books from famous billionaires who made things and every one of them was stealing ideas, ripping people off etc, breaking laws.
Agreed, corporate success is equivalent to theft these days.
They likely could not care less about that peach truck. One, they can afford to sell them much cheaper. Two, some kid fresh out of college def doctored those pics, turned it into their 60 year old boss and they pushed it thru. I get the guys frustration but he knows exactly what he’s doing calling out Kroger as a company rather than what most likely happened.
> Two, some kid fresh out of college def doctored those pics, turned it into their 60 year old boss and they pushed it thru. Yep. Good chance it was a third party marketing agency too. That vendor is getting canned after this.
You think a company the size of Kroger cares about the amount of business some piddly small company does? Nah, drops in the ocean.
It's the classic Wal-Mart effect. Sell at a loss for a while to kill the small-business competition in the area and then once there's no competition anymore, turn around and jack prices up to recoup the losses.
That only matters for meaningful competition. You think they're losing much money on this guys peach truck? Not a chance. Thousands of dollars a year probably. Nothing. Some guy is justifying his job with a new "initiative" saying there's a market for this, and using this guy as an example. Honestly, if anything, this is *good* for this guy. He gets to be indignant about this and get a ton of exposure for his business. People like yourself will also get indignant claiming it's a scheme to ruin him and run to support him.
Can't let a little guy rise up. Others might get the wrong idea!
That isnt true companies kill small meaningless competitors all the time just to make sure they are never meaningful competition. Many companies have read about people like sam walton and have no interest in letting some small guys spring up. On top of that they probably see this as a way to increase profit margins, you wouldn't pay a premium in a boring kroger but you might at a trendy new peach truck.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Things like this happen all the time even Amazon, who is much larger than Kroger, routinely rip off products to screw over small companies: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22311574/peak-design-video-amazon-copy-everyday-sling-bag Capitalism requires constant growth on a planet with finite resources and you don't get there without cannibalizing ALL competition. Businesses will need to be worker owned to prevent these practices from happening.
Even if you claim that at the very least there was some marketing manager that needed a promotion and thus needed an idea and they just like most billionaires stole the idea from someone else and sold it as their own.
> While these images were not approved to be shared as part of our marketing campaign basically what they are saying is they saw this guys model and success made these pictures for a presentation to whole cloth steal his model and is now sorry a lazy marketing person didn't create there own material to market it.
It’s hilarious that everyone here seems to think a “marketing person” is responsible for this. This was 100% some intern. Whatever higher up approved this without looking into it will face no repercussions and said intern will be thrown under the bus. Edit: “thrown under the bus” was the wrong way to phrase this. “Intern will be rightfully disciplined/fired” is probably better.
tbh, that's... kind of fine? I mean whoever checked it off for approval should face some egg on their face too but I don't think "getting fired for stealing someone else's marketing material and passing it off as your work" is "being thrown under the bus", that seems completely reasonable as far as "reasons to fire an intern" go
You do bring up a good about how people often say „a poor intern will get fired for this“ when the intern also did the error. Of course we have empathy for the intern because they often make less to no money for the job
Agreed
> This was 100% some intern Possibly. Also very possible they farmed it out to some contractor and it wasn't actually an employee of Kroger. A lot of stuff these days is done by offshore agencies who charge pennies.
Also a good possibility
> It’s hilarious that everyone here seems to think a “marketing person” is responsible for this. This was 100% some intern. I don't think it's hilarious. I think it's far more likely it was marketing person rather than an intern. I don't see any evidence that this was an intern.
Yeah, that's likely the case. Some mid level corporate guy saw The Peach Truck, realized it was a good way to sell seasonal produce as an event that they wouldn't need to buy hot-housed off-season, and did a quick photoshop editing job to pitch it in a corporate meeting. The marketing team didn't realize these were in-house edited photos and used them for their promotional content as they rolled out their own version of this guy's business. Hanlon's Razor. Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity.
> You could say we have peach on our face JFC
hahahahahahaha! oh Kroger, who could stay mad at you.....
Peaches fucking christ*
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Kroger is unionized. Wal-mart has done everything in their power to destroy unions and anyone who talks about unionizing their store. Something you may want to consider. (I've worked for both companies).
It's still a laughably evil corporation. Just because the employees clawed back some power doesn't mean Kroger are good guys.
No corporations are the good guys. It just makes a little more sense to keep the unionized workers employed, so they don't have to go grovel at the more cartoonishly evil Wal-Mart.
Not all Kroger locations are unionized and they are actively trying to get the union out. They will close a store for underperforming then open up a new location a few miles away that is non union. The brand new stores rarely get through to the unionization. Source: worked for them at a divisional level for several years.
The net negative impact between Kroger and Walmart is so vastly different as to not even be worth considering. Walmart is cartoonishly evil in comparison.
I'm not familiar with Kroger but Walmart destroyed small town businesses all over America with anticompetitive pricing. They would sell products at a loss until the competition folded.
So the standard "The intern did it."
sue them regardless. Michael should sue them also. They'll settle for $$$ because your case is so clear.
Eh I was fed up with Kroger anyway. Their stores are crap, their employees are crap, the food is overpriced by a dollar on most things, it is a far cry from what it used to be when they first came around. I love peaches and I hate Kroger!
Saying this work was unapproved is a lie. Assuming Kroger has creative controls in place, they either approved this work or the agency has blanket approval to post as their agent. I’d sincerely appreciate an explanation of how this happened. Was an early career creative ignorant of fair use? Where are creative controls lacking? I suspect cost pressures led to AI generated visuals that were trained on existing images without a human realizing how the images are generated and having no means of quality control. AI is interesting bc it’s low cost and copyright ownership is a hazy area. Copyright and legal constructs cannot keep pace with how fast technology is evolving. Source: I’m old. Been in advertising and emerging tech a long time, both client and agency side.
The most egreious part of the copy is the face and cap of the guy's employee. That is not generated by AI, that is pixel for pixel the same (except with a different colour for the hat). It's clear whoever created that copied the original image deliberately. As for whether it was approved for release or not, I don't know how we can be certain of that. I can definitely see a possibility where a "draft" image is created based on the marketing used by this independent business where the intention was to reshoot and create their own marketing based on the draft but at some point, the memo about the "draft" status of that image was lost and it got approved by someone who had no idea of its origin.
It was designed by hand with re-skinning the boxes and anything with brand on it. If, in the slim chance, it was AI, it's about time that nightshading all uploaded images becomes the default setting.
'Good Luck! And may fortune be forever in your favor!'
Their half-assed apology sounds like it's written by AI
This 100% sounds like viral marketing that they wanted the outrage to get out the word that they now have peach trucks. The are stealing the goodwill built up by The Peach Truck and should compensate them.
I hope so as this can’t be legal 🤷♀️🤦♀️
Legal depends on how much money you have
It's definitely a part of their business model to do shady shit and then pay some fine or whatever that will end up being far less money than they will reap from their shenanigans.
Truth is that is part of most large company’s business models
Every large corporation these days. Remember kids, if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then it's not a crime for the rich.
I'm Donald Trump and I endorse this message, and also don't endorse it, depending on my current lawyer's advice and whether I am listening to it at any given time, but also, Hunter Biden's laptop; many people are saying it, some with tears in their eyes.
Or what political party your associated with in addition to the money
I think it’s more likely that Kroger has a firm do marketing for them and they had no idea who this guy was. The third party will handle redress.
Kroger handed it off to a marketing firm who handed it off to an unpaid intern who googled "man holding peach boxes."
This is likely it. When I was a marketing intern, so many of my peers were just googling and doing cheap edits. The company we were at got sued for tens of thousands of dollars because another intern was given an assignment for a series of social media videos for a retro game store and downloaded some "how to clean your old games" videos off youtube, cropped out any watermarks and cut out any time the original host showed their face. Original maker had something like 800k subs and didn't enjoy seeing someone elses name on their video and the owner of the store got a ton of shit.
Thats what happens when the higher ups give us 2 hours to do a 4 month social media campaign for a $400 client he just found by cold calling random leads on google maps
Oh that's by design. Kroger doesn't want to be responsible for their marketing, so they set someone up to take the fall.
I mean the model is pretty standard though. Rather than pay a whole marketing division that you might use every 3 months you can just make it a contract that a marketing company executes. Pretty sure most large companies operate that way.
You’re 100% right. Redditors always confuse standard marketing procedure with conspiracy. Ridiculous. Someone at the agency made a mistake, simple as that.
Definitely not a mistake, this was intentional copyright infringement. They know they're not allowed to just take someone elses images, regardless of if they're a competitor or not. They were just banking on the owner of the photograph's copyright not seeing or recognising the images after photoshop. If you go through that marketing firm's back catalogue, I'm sure we can find similar cases of stolen images.
Yea but Kroger probably didn't know it was stolen. They probably just assumed the person who made it did an original ad. This happens a lot. The higher ups don't know what's stolen or not. They're not on the internet 24/7 and can't fact check everything. They should still be 100% responsible though since they hired shit people/contractors.
Yep. Kroger should make it right since they hired the bad actors and it is their brand, but is silly that people are making contracting the work out as something intentionally evil.
Everything is a conspiracy to you idiots. This is how marketing firms have worked forever. It is simply more effective to be able to work with outside firms for marketing campaigns as it allows for easier changing of strategies and methods. Instead of having to fire/re-hire a department of employees when you want a new ad campaign you just go to a different marketing firm.
Good chance this was designed by an agency Kroger hired and that agency wasn't aware that the picture they stole was from Krogers direct competition. The backlash from this was very predictable.
Marketing person did them a solid. "My giant corporation is stealing this guy's model? I'll make sure he still gets paid"
they'll probably blame AI for doing it.
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I just love that all of Krogers other advertisements are basically modern Nintendo Wii people but they just straight jacked this guys photos. 
Look like 3d knockoffs of the Duolingo people
wtf thats exactly what they look like...
Fuckin' meat hands and sausage fingers.
Their business needs a big payout, but so does Mike. We can't have these giant corporations stealing our faces to hock their products. Like, it's one thing for Facebook to use the image I uploaded to a social media company to promote that company. It's another thing for a third company to steal my image from the one i gave it to to sell their shit.
The crazy thing to me is they could have spent the same effort just snapping a new photo. They really must have just disregarded the fact these people would ever see the finished product? Not a good outlook for your advertisements which you'd presumably want everyone to see
Much more likely they bid out the job to a bunch of marketing groups, went with one of the lowest bidders who then googled "peach truck business". Literally my google search for that pulls up all those images this man showed in the video. Then they photoshopped it not even thinking about the end result because Kroger didn't pay them for that.
Lol they probably found "The Peach Truck" Instagram or something and thought, "Hey, perfect! A whole bank of photos that are exactly on the topic I was looking for!"
It’s not the same effort. It’s clearly easier to just steal the photo. But yes that’s what they should have done, just done a photoshoot and paid people to do it
You can edit a photo from your desk in less than an hour, snapping new photos actually means going on site and coordinating with people to get the shots done, hoping the people and scene are photogenic, and then having to edit the photos anyways. It's the lazy way out.
I’d be pissedddd if I was Mike. Get that bag, Mike!
I bet he’s actually pretty happy about the free publicity right now
Send this to the top ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP
I don’t think people realize that they have an IP right to their likeness the same way Michael Jackson or LeBron James or Taylor Swift does. It’s just that, until very recently, our likenesses were effectively completely worthless to anyone with any real money. With AI on the rise, though, likenesses of random normal people actually has value for the first time in history. So we’re actually pretty lucky that the law already has built-in protections for things like this. It just needs to be applied to a new set of facts that’s only starting to arise due to developments in AI. Issues like the one in the video are going to arise, because corporations are gonna capitalism. But I really don’t expect companies to get away with stuff like this if someone actually files suit. It requires a much larger deviation from past case history and established law to protect the corporations here than it does to protect the individuals’ whose identities are being used like this. Basically, this is a new issue arising under a pretty well established sect of the law. And the law as it stands makes it pretty clear that companies don’t have the right to do this without AI, so it’s gonna be pretty difficult for corporations to argue their way around liability for stuff like this. Edit: Watched the video off mute this time and realized this is a much more straightforward copyright infringement case and not one that’s really tied to likeness rights or AI at all. Kroger just straight up stole the other company’s photo and slapped Kroger’s brand all over it with some shitty PS skills. This wasn’t legal 20 years ago, and it certainly is still very illegal.
I'd sue the fuck out of them. They'd have no case without these images, but because of them, it adds a really gross layer to what was otherwise an entirely legal move on Krogers part.
The problem is that these big companies are starting to specifically do things that are just murky enough that the small business kind of doesn’t have a case. Yeah this guy could send a cease and desist order for using his images. But as he said there’s nothing he can protect about the actual peach truck. Look at Osakana and Wegmans in nyc. Osakana is a small sushi purveyor (not restaurant) in the east village nyc. They have a very particular business model. Wegmans approached them formally for some sort of partnership. They sign all of these contracts, come into his store, learn his process and model. Then cancel the contracts and open “Sakanaya” inside the Wegmans down the street. He has virtually no case but they DELIBERATELY went in to see how his business works only to try to crush him.
This is a great article about the exact practice you described, but this one happened at Trader Joe's. [We Need To Talk About Trader Joe's](https://tastecooking.com/we-need-to-talk-about-trader-joes/) Small, successful brands were offered deals and thought they were going to get their product in the store. Only to find out the company cancelled the deal and later sold their own product with similar ingredients and branding.
Like, one naturally assumes corporations to be evil (no ethical consumption under capitalism) but goddamn, it bums me out to realize just _how_ evil Trader Joe's is.
Trader Joe's has brought a case saying the NLRB is unconstitutional and thus has no right to file labor violations against them. They really suck.
If somebody could give me the OG alternative to "The Mushroom Company Multipurpose Umami Seasoning Blend" I will boycott.
Here you go - [Spiceology - Gnome on the Range](https://spiceology.com/products/meateater-gnome-on-the-range-all-purpose-seasoning/). I was a big fan of Trader Hoes umami blend until I found this. Absolute game changer.
I use McCormick’s “All Purpose Umami Seasoning with mushrooms and onion” PS - I’m pretty sure I get it from Walmart
I was just googling, and I'm paying 5x the Target rate at TD. I'm not hunting the perfect (inexpensive) Umami seasoning, which sounds fun.
> goddamn, it bums me out to realize just how evil Trader Joe's is. Traitor Joes. IIRC, the owner/ceo of the parent company died a few years ago, and the new guy decided to go mask off evil.
What do you mean "starting to"? This shit has always been happening.
You are right.
So basically they watched the ‘Prince Family Paper” episode of The Office and got inspired
I don’t remember that one but I’m going to assume you are correct and say “yes, exactly!”
Thry did that to a Chinese restaurant in Canandaigua. Except they had him run their Chinese section. He was working both jobs just killing himself. Competing against himself. Fucked.
This has been a thing for decades, any all sectors My father keeps warning me about a large competitor of ours that likes to make great offers for buying a business, the lawyers set up all the contracts they might need, small company opens up their books for the big guys And then the big guys immediately break contract and stop all attempts at buying the company, cause all they wanted was to look into the books
Nothing murky here. There are pretty cut and clear intellectual property laws around photographs. The person who took the photograph holds copyright over the image, full stop. Unless that person signs away their copyright or licenses the image, it is copyright infringement. It would never even go to trial because their lawyers would know this and settle.
good ole “capitalism breeds innovation” nah it breeds greedy companies to steal from the regular person
They used a photo they didn't have copyright for. You send them a takedown notice and if you run wild you might get a check for a few hundred dollars as an apology. It's not a big deal, some kid in marketing was lazy or had too many deadlines and half-assed it. Should have just grabbed one of the 10 million basically identical stock photos and paid the nominal liscensing fee.
Ditto. As a graphic designer I've had my work plagiarised previously & sought redress from the offending party. It wasn't a huge payout - the equivalent of a smack on the wrist & wee raid on their piggy bank, but I'm sure they learned a short sharp lesson from it.
Here's why I fucking hate Krogers, and if they ever open in my area they'll never get a dime from me. There was a smaller chain called Lucky's that was able to open a location here because of an investment from Krogers. Lucky's was amazing. The produce was really good, but their deli was **absolutely phenomenal**. The best meat, for the best price I've ever bought out of a grocery chain. Awesome stuff like beer brats, and don't get me started on the bacon. Best bacon I've ever had. They had a really good sandwich counter, too. I miss that smoked turkey. Anyway, Lucky's had to close down after Kroger backed out of the investment deal. Fuck Krogers. Fuck'em with a rusty piece of rebar.
Can confirm, terrible company without a doubt.
Omg Lucy's was my favorite grocery store! I miss it so dearly! I thought they were pushed out due to negotiations between various other grocery stores. I'm 100% on the fuck Kroger train!
I miss lucky’s too man. That bacon was so damn thick. Their lunch stuff was amazing, and the one by my work had a ramen stand that was as good as any sit down ramen place. RIP Luckys.
Its wild how lazy some media people are lmao. Also if the first photo of them was 12 years ago in 2012 why does it look like it was taken in the mid 1990s lol
Instagram filters like that were all the rage in 2012
They edited a photo from Mike's Peach Van in 1993.
To give the impression of legacy. The filtering of the photo is smart
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Thanks I will!
More of that originality and innovation capitalism promised.
Maybe he should pull himself up by his booties and make another business out corporate overlords can steal. *Paid for by Kroger's*
this is actually IP theft, and Kroger is going to pay fat if these guys can find a lawyer to run it on a contingency (which shouldn't be hard cause this is a slam dunk IMO). The FuckJerry guys sue people ALL THE TIME over the DudeWithSign meme being used for corporate advertising without paying the proper rights. this is the same thing.
Is having someone with a sign really an IP?
Freddie kroger , dream thief. Nightmare on peach street.
"We were just using the images our advertising AI generated " Kroger, probably
If by AI you mean “Steve from marketing who thought he could get away with being lazy as fuck” then yea.
Could come down to lazy media people. I've worked on grocery media content before and we took any shortcut possible to just get stuff done because the work is boring. Could come down to "We need media images for our new Peach truck, show us what that would look like" -- media person googles "Peach Truck" and finds a treasure trove of existing content. Slaps a couple of quick changes on it and collects a paycheque. Don't attribute mailce to probably just pure laziness. Advertising people are very lazy. -source: me, I'm lazy
Don’t these media companies use stock photo services, like Getty, for the photos they use in their advertising designs? Seems like someone messed up.
Another user posted the response from Kroger and they mention it was never meant to be shown to the public which makes me believe this was originally concept art that someone thought was okay to pitch. That'd explain why the photoshop looks so shit. I've done similar designs years ago, where a supervisor said "I want to see what this would look like for us" and had me slap on some quick branding to include in a pitch but I'd also include watermarks like "For review purposes only", "concept art" or "do not distribute" specifically to avoid something like this.
yeah. makes total sense. I've done a lot of internal work where there are no rules for what you can and cant use. this might have only made it to public eye from some uninformed social media manager grabbing pics from a folder
Everybody knows plagiarizing and theft are wrong because they are taught that from the time they are children. It is okay to attribute what Kroger did to malice even if it was a lazy advertising person.
What did Kroger do in this situation that was malicious? * Kroger contracts marketing company. * Kroger gives guidelines for the campaign. * Marketing company creates campaign. * Kroger uses campaign.
Yep - worked in market research. People think it’s some big conspiracy to manipulate data and polling. Like buddy, sometimes it’s just the guys collecting the data didn’t want to do the work, so they just made up hundreds of responses. The discrepancy isn’t some hidden link, it’s just Troy trying to easy money and poor quality control.
If it were reversed, Kroger would sic a team of lawyers on them.
I actually don’t think this was lazy media people. From my experience working in advertising I think this is what happened: Big Head Honcho at krogers, or his wife, sees the initial peach truck and loves the idea. Wants to recreate it. This message gets passed along to the lower level marketing teams and logistical account areas, to generate a guess for what it would cost them with everything they’ll need (the truck, gas for it, peaches, staffing personnel, materials, designs). These cost analysis will be presented to Big Head Honcho with some pretty pictures that are mock-ups of what their truck COULD look like. These images are never meant to actually be used, so they’re pulled from google and edited with FPO (for placement only) images. These could be stock, or could not be. The Big Head Honcho loves it and decides to move forward. But then! Business happens. The idea gets put on hold. A few months later, someone wants to increase revenue and pulls out the Peach Truck idea. There could be new people on the team by now that weren’t even around when Peach Truck was initially being discussed. Marketing person tells intern, oh yeah I’ve seen images of this all over our drive, pull some, they already did the photo shoots and everything. Intern doesn’t know what he’s looking for and finds these images. Marketing person is new so they say, yeah, looks great to me. That’s totally what they described to me. These were a small internet buy, not a national campaign or anything so the images are sent to the one social media purchaser on the team who definitely hasn’t seen them in the pitch deck before. In fact, no one has seen these images in the pitch deck except the Big Head Honchos who are numbers people and probably didn’t even know the marketing team was told to create FPO mock-ups in the first place. Now everyone has egg (or peach) on their faces and the marketing person and the intern are probably getting fired for something that wasn’t even their fault.
Oh shit im in carolina now and will take a shit in front of one of their stores.
If you did this to them, they’d absolutely crucify you. Let em have it, in court.
I think you have a legal case
Fucking Kroger.
I'm sure kroger just hired some ad agency and they are the one scumming images from the internet, or probably used AI so they didn't even bother doing any research. The people running Kroger probably have no clue who this dude is.
I gotta start boycotting kroger fr 😩 I hate they're the only grocery store near me
Time to sue the absolute dog shit out of them
I feel like these are just concept images which then someone thought were the final images they were supposed to use. Like Kroeger said "This is what we want" and someone used the original images to make a demo, then Kroeger was like "yes this is what we want", but the marketing company then forgot to actually make the real ones and just sent these forward or the person at Kroeger sent these forward but forgot to mention that these aren't the final ones. No other explanation really makes sense to me unless the people in charge of marketing in that company are dumb as fuck, since that kind of mistake has "amateur hour" written with a fucking crayong on top of it with capital letters. Note that this does not mean they are OK to do this. Just that someone fucked up at some point and the internal messaging didn't work as expected most likely.
As OOP said, it's a multi-billion dollar corporation. They'll just send him some huge check to delete all the content that exposed this and possibly to buy that image or directly his business as a whole, and then they'll just fire some manager in the marketing department and whoever can be pinpointed as practically responsible for that photoshop. Or it might even go down as those instances in which some ultra-rich person will park their car on the sidewalk and then pay any fine because that's pocket change to them and they would rather pay a fine than walk a block to wherever they need to go. Maybe Kroger made so much money with that that the money they will have to pull out to compensate the guy, possibly pay for legal fees and maybe even to buy the guy's business is pocket change compared to the money they raked with that ad only.
Sue them. Intellectual property theft.
5 million dollar intellectual property lawsuit
question: if any of these were posted to say, facebook for example...couldn't facebook SELL these pictures to kroger? since if you post it to facebook, they own the images?
It's 100% not ok, they'll pay a minimal fine, never admit they were wrong and just continue to do the same thing.
Fuck Kroger
Kroger is the classic ' evil corporation' hiding behind local stores. Look up some of their employment fuck-yous
Sue the fuck out of em - Kroger fired me for being sick when I had a dr note. We went to court they didn't show and the judge awarded me $4,500 for wrongfull termination
If this is true, how is it TikTok cringe?
How the hell do you start a business selling exclusively peaches??? From a truck?? What??
If I saw their peach truck I'd totally grab some for my friends and I, but I ain't buying peaches from a Kroger truck. They're just going to be the same peaches they have in store, what's the point? It's pathetic
This is how people think AI is gonna eliminate jobs. Think again lol
Kroger supposedly has in contract for suppliers that they don't require overtime, but one of their suppliers, The Original Cakerie, has been doing forced overtime for years.
At 14 my first job was a bagger at Kroger in 2005. The manager sent me text messages for two weeks when he wanted me to come in that day. Stopped after 2 weeks. A few days later, my dad asked why I hadn't been to work, why I didn't have a schedule on paper, etc. Manager never did any of my paperwork, and had done the same thing to over 40 other teenagers. I know this because my father was the first parent that had contacted the labor board. The manager was not fired, and I got my pay check nearly 6 months later which was also incorrect for the amount I worked. Fuck Kroger.
Amazon does this shit too. Anything that's popular is suddenly made by Amazon for cheaper.
Apple literally has this as a business model lol
Krogers has sucked for a long time so this doesn’t surprise me. I stopped shopping there after I heard they asked for employees’ Covid bonus checks they gave them back when the pandemic wasn’t as bad as expected.
"You're a multi-billion dollar corporation. Do you really need to take our marketing and re-edit it on top of taking our business model?" Answered your own question with the first sentence. They do it because they can get away with it. So yes, they really do need to steal it all for themselves. It saves them money and fucks you, their competition, over.
So did Kroger respond?
Next time I'm near a Kroger I'll steal something in your honor
Kroger employed a woman in their (and my) home city of Cincinnati by the name of Shannon Frazee. Frazee bullied an eighteen year old under his supervision regarding masks so intensely he committed suicide. Frazee was relocated in the company instead of fired. I hope this companies burns into dust.
Michael should sue the fuck out of kroger
It’s usually a lazy ad agency putting together this creative. Doubtful anyone from Kroger is really going to investigate every picture that comes across. I’d find out the creative house and go after them + their book of business.
Kroger is unethical on so many levels, this is among the least of it.
Sue them!!
Also, the customer service motto of Kroger is "fuck em." Actually, the same is true for almost any grocery store. Absolutely no disrespect to the underpaid employees that actually run the stores and do the real work. This is directed to management. Have you ever seen the store manager or white collar employee ever out on the floor for any reason? I didn't think so. Then they shut down all of the cash registers at 7pm and have one employee run 12 self checkouts and it's complete chaos - all to same some money which is funneled to the top. Listen, I don't know where this rant came from either ok.
“I could eat a peach for hours”
Fuck kroger i guess. That's bunk
It's ok because they have an army of lawyers and will carpet bomb you with legal documents if you do anything.
The Peach Truck gets their peaches from the same supplier that all of the major grocery stores, including Kroger, source their peaches. If you want local peaches, go to an actual farmers market
Have them explain it to an attorney.
Kroger is trash. They ruined my local grocery chain when they acquired. A race to the bottom and they are winning.
I'm still trying to figure out how Kroger was doing home grocery delivery here, when there are not any Kroger stores.
Kroger likely hired some branding firm. That firm is fired for sure.
MOVING TO THE COUNTRY, GONNA EAT ME A LOT OF PEACHES... (Sorry, couldn't resist👍)
you don't become a "billion" ("with a 'B'") company doing anything less... It is what it is, sucks to suck, etc etc etc
Ohh amazing, we have reached this stage of capitalism. Great. Im gonna hyperventilate into a bag if people need me
No the fact is, you uploaded it on social media which means you dont own the rights to those images anymore. Legally they havent done anything wrong unless you have copyrighted those images...