Safeway CEO Sees Glut of National Brands

As a follow-up to our previous articles about private label and SKU rationalization, this article quotes Safeway as saying that there may be too many national brands in some categories: "'I do think that there probably are more national brands out there in various categories than there really needs to be,' Burd said Wednesday at a Goldman Sachs retail conference. 'The situation might put some pressure on consumer-product companies to rationalize their product lines,' he added." Scary words if you're not a category leader.