Why'd you leave the grocery store?

You're listening to Motley Full Money.

I'm Ricky Mulvey, joined today by Nick Seiple. Nick, we got a lot of earnings. It's good to see you.

Thanks for being here. Great to be here with you, Ricky. So, Croger, the grocery store, it reported this morning.

And if you didn't hear Dylan and Bill Barker earlier this week, Rodney McMullen resigned. I think it was on Monday.

Kroger's Investor Relations Department told investors basically everything he did not do, Nick. It had nothing to do with an employee at Kroger, nothing to do with the stock or financials.

That's what we know. And on the call this morning, I found it interesting that McMullen was not

mentioned by name.

Usually, if there's an outgoing CEO, we thank them for their service to the company and their

shareholder return or whatever. But this was a clean sweep. Interim CEO, Ron Sargent, is in

and we're only focused on the future. Did you find that odd? What did you make of Kroger's handling of this departure?

Yeah, some kind of of two minds here. I mean, the first one was, as you said, the company

has said, didn't involve Kroger Associates, financial performance operations, or reporting. So you could

argue maybe it's not material to what they're trying to discuss today with the earnings results. And

maybe that discussion, discussing what had gone on would distract more from what the business is doing

relative to the value that it would get to observers. But another angle I've thought about is,

you know, maybe there's a legal angle here, right? Reporting out there says the CEO has forfeited

$11.2 million in compensation upon resignation. That's a lot of money, and that might incentivize

you to maybe engage legal counsel to try to claw back some of that. So both from the perspective

of maybe minimizing what you put on record from a legal perspective and keeping focus on what

the company is actually doing, that probably explains why they decided not to address it directly.

I think the lawyers may have been paying a little bit closer attention to this earnings call than they normally do, Nick.

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