Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Actually, there has probably already been confusion for any Albertsons customer who moved from the Supervalu zone to the Cerberus zone or vice versa. Customers really don’t like it when a loyalty card stops working while they’re on vacation, or the self-checkout they expected is nowhere to be found. And anyone who stumbled onto the wrong chain’s Web site was likely to be puzzled at best and misinformed at worst.

Now, Cerberus’s Albertsons will run the chain, though two-thirds of the stores (and their customers) are accustomed to the Supervalu Albertsons experience. The company can take its time with Jewel and Shaw’s, because those chains are being shifted intact. But with Albertsons, there’s no way to avoid confusion once the dueling Web sites are merged.

YouTube and Twitter? Not a problem—just clean up the branding. Loyalty program? That’s messier. Shut it down, and you anger loyalty-loving customers of most of the stores. Keep it going, and there’s no good way to keep from advertising it on the Web site to customers of the roughly 200 stores where the loyalty card can’t be used today.

How fast can those 200 stores be connected to the loyalty system? And where will that system be? Supervalu doubled the size of its Albertsons datacenter in Boise, Idaho, after the split, so that’s the logical place to put combined systems—unless the politics of consolidation says it isn’t. (Both sides of the chain kept their respective headquarters in Boise after the split, even though for Cerberus Albertsons, its nearest store was two states away in Colorado.)

The two chains’ pharmacy systems will have to be merged as an early priority. They’ve only had seven years to become completely incompatible. And the only thing customers hate more than a loyalty card that no longer works when on vacation is a prescription that no longer works.

Both chains even have slightly different privacy policies on their Web sites (due largely, but not entirely, to having or not having a loyalty program) that have to be harmonized.

Then comes the only-slightly-more-leisurely task of dealing with in-store systems that have to be reconfigured. Except for the great To Self-Checkout Or Not debate, those systems will have less of an impact on customer expectations, so they can wait a little while. But making POS systems consistent can’t, or that first quarterly close will be a nightmare.

And those are only the obvious, highly visible IT issues. For anyone on the outside, this should be very interesting. Everyone on the inside probably has another word in mind.

At least they won’t have to repaint the signs.