Very rare pro-consumer W
Very rare pro-consumer W
Is it though? I fear that all this will do is allow WalMart to clobber them individually then take over their market share. A&K combined are already smaller than Wally World. (13% vs 22%). It would actually be more helpful to the grocery market if they forced Walmart to divest, what their doing with this is likely to end up with Walmart taking it all.
I actually agree. They’re targeting the smaller fish in "big business " when they should be focusing on Walmart amazon google and the like
Two of the major chains in my area merged a while back and they were required to close down a few of their stores to prevent having a monopoly.
So of course they closed the stores that were under-performing, which just means they closed the ones in poor neighborhoods.
They still owned or kept the leases to the buildings and sub-leased them out with the stipulation that any business taking them over could not carry groceries.
Not only are the people in those areas having to drive a lot further (or spend more time on public transit), but a lot the surrounding businesses to the stores that closed down ended up going out of business themselves.
There’s at least one nearly abandoned mini-small, shopping plaza in town due to this.
that seems like anti competitive behavior, I wonder if those kinds of stipulations could be made illegal. Also a commercial vacancy tax probably wouldn’t hurt.
They are legal. This is/was Walmart’s M.O. for anticompetitive behavior when one of their stores closed. Any competitors couldn’t lease, other businesses failed when they moved and didn’t have the traffic, and so you are left with both an unoccupied eye sore as well as a food / product desert…
Good idea on the vacancy and potentially changing the law to prevent anti-competitive stipulations like that.
As an Australian who has to deal with the duopoly of our grocery stores after we let them all merge years ago, it absolutely will drive higher prices and nobody who isn’t a shareholder should want this.
They basically “collude” to fix and raise prices here and have whole teams of people who’s job it is to monitor and extract as much money out of us as possible. They also force growers to accept shitty deals or they reject their produce due to “not meeting their quality standards” and there’s basically nowhere else for them to sell it in the quantities they need to.
Nobody wins in grocery store mergers except the shareholders.
Australia is super concentrated, the duopoly own 70% of the grocery store market as well as others like 60% of the alcohol market. The rest is made up of convenience stores (mostly one company, IGA) and Aldi, the latter having single digit percent.
You basically sell and buy groceries though these two or you don’t exist. The CEO of one of them got so cocky during a recent interview he was forced to resign over it.
I guess we are pretty lucky over here in Germany then. We may have had some consolidation in the last few years, but there are still quite a few different grocery store companies competing.
The big ones are Aldi, Lidl, Rewe, Edeka, Netto, Penny and Norma. Quite a few of them own other supermarket chains as well, but those arent in my list.
Our supermarket market is so competitive that even companies like walmart failed to enter it (they also didnt do away with weird US customs, which probably didnt help).
With the current extreme price gouging, seems like the perfect political cover to anti-trust the hell out of them and break them up.
You’d know the Libs would moan and get the Murdoch media to pump out the propaganda, but I think the Australian public would be on board. The tax cut reversal went over totally fine, because I guess on average people aren’t as stupid as the Libs would like.
(For international readers, the Liberal Party are the leaders of the conservative coalition, confusingly.
Albertsons has been buying up competitors for a while.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertsons
Kroger has a few too:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger#Chains
They turned Pavilions from a nice store to another dingy grocery. I can’t imagine this going through would be good for consumers. Many neighborhoods only have access to 2 stores at best, and I suspect most are already owned by the same parent. A merger would further turn this into a monopoly.
FTC is a captured agency with revolving door administration between what businesses they regulate and people responsible for regulation.
You’re not wrong, but the appointment of Lina Khan to head the FTC is easily one of the only good things Biden has done while in office.
So, at least she’ll go down kicking and screaming before they finally snuff her out, metaphorically speaking.
Honestly, i dislike his age, his stance on Israel and some other general things but overall I think Biden has accomplished a lot of good things as president.
Some examples:
- rejoined Paris Agreement
- rejoined WHO
- ends federal private prison contracts
- 130+ billion in student loan forgiveness
- Russia sanctions
- national registry for police fired for misconduct
- executive order protecting travel for abortion
- gas prices down (not all in his control but still)
- inflation reduction act
- Arguably the best post-pandemic economy in the world
Lina Khan has been extraordinarily ineffective at the head of the FTC.
While the agency has made a lot of noise about holding big tech accountable, all they’ve managed to accomplish is losing court cases and setting even more precedent against the government’s ability to enforce anti-monopoly legislation against these companies.
Her heart seems to be in the right place, but results matter as well.
Hell I’m in Seattle and my walkable area (about 2 mile radius for me) would be reduced to this mega corp, Amazon, and a couple Asian marts. I’ve got two corner stores nearby but their produce is usually not great and mostly they have snacks and microwavables. I suspect smaller towns or less bustling neighborhoods could easily be reduced to just this super chain and nowhere else
