The Albertsons board of directors meets in Boise, Idaho, this weekend and an announcement could soon follow.

Although it is still possible that negotiations could sour or that a rival team of investors could swoop in, The Wall Street Journal said Friday it appears the investment group that includes Cerberus Capital, Kimco Realty and Supervalu will complete the second-largest leveraged buyout in history.

Some fear such a buyout will set the stage for heavy layoffs and massive store closings as Albertsons gets picked apart for its real estate values in the face of poor financial results and the mounting market power of Wal-Mart.

It is difficult to say right now what might happen after a sale of Albertsons assets is completed, said Jim Olsen of the Utah Food Industry Association.

"A lot of the names that keep getting mentioned as possible buyers are either entirely or partly in the grocery business, so you have to think that they might want to keep at least some of Albertsons' stores open," Olsen said.

Albertsons operates about 2,500 supermarkets and drugstores in 37 states, including approximately 50 in Utah, where it employs about 1,100 workers.

Apart from the potential buyout, the Boise, Idaho, company is still hashing out details with drugstore retailer CVS Corp., which is in the lead to purchase the company's well-regarded drug chain for up to $4 billion of the overall purchase price.

Cerberus hasn't commented about its plans for Albertsons' stores, but those familiar with the bid say it relies heavily on their real-estate value, and less on continuing operations, the Wall Street Journal said. And some observers suggest that Supervalu probably isn't interested in running the entire operation but instead would take over one or more of Albertsons' attractive divisions.

Supervalu operates traditional stores under the Cub banner and runs a division of ''hard discount stores'' called Save-A-Lot that sells limited assortments of groceries at low prices.

Even if Albertsons' buyer were to step in and shutter all of the company's stores in Utah, those locations probably wouldn't be vacant for very long.

A lot of those properties are older and have very low lease rates, which means that they can be subleased to new tenants at very reasonable rates but still generate a healthy income for the buyer, said Bill Martin, a principal at the Commerce CRG commercial real estate brokerage in Salt Lake City.

The number of traditional grocery stores nationwide has dropped to 41,455 in 2004 from 118,920 in 1982 because thousands of small independent grocers have shut down, according to figures from Willard Bishop Consulting, a retail-marketing consulting firm in Barrington, Ill. But the total square feet of traditional grocery store selling space has grown as traditional grocers build larger stores and Wal-Mart blankets the country with supercenters that sell groceries.

Some industry analysts hope that Albertsons will close enough stores to make a dent in that glut.

Albertsons, the nation's No. 2 traditional grocer by sales, put itself up for sale in September after it and other traditional grocers lost their hold on the U.S. grocery market to Wal-Mart at the beginning of the decade. Although No. 1 traditional grocer Kroger Co. fought back by whittling down its prices and No. 3 Safeway Inc. rolled out visually appealing fresh-format stores, Albertson's bounced between new pricing and format strategies that left it without a clear identity.

Traditional grocers such as Albertson's once controlled the nation's food-selling business. But in 2001, Wal-Mart displaced Kroger as the nation's largest food seller, and supermarkets have been scrambling to reshape their strategies ever since.

If the Cerberus buyout is successful, it would be the second-largest on record. The largest was the $29 billion purchase of RJR Nabisco Inc. by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1988.

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Tribune reporter Steve Oberbeck contributed to this story.

On the market

l It is the nation's second-largest grocery chain

l Operates about 50 supermarkets in Utah and 2,500 supermarkets and drugstores nationwide

l Employs about 1,100 people in Utah and 240,000 nationwide

l Its brands include Albertson's Acme, Shaw's and Jewel supermarkets, and Osco and Sav-on Drugs drugstores

l Albertsons was founded in 1939 on a downtown Boise street corner by entrepreneur Joe Albertson, who was among the first American grocery retailers to combine supermarkets with drugstores