#grocery — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #grocery, aggregated by home.social.
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From camp it can be a 25 minute drive to a supermarket. Here, see the dirt road before the highway. Then the grocery, still “Rob’s” - but he’s passed.
Before he died he left it to the workers, as I understand, since now the sign in the deli says “employee owned “ where a picture of Rob used to hang.
A true “commie grocery” in deep red Pennsylvania, and no Zohran in sight.
(Over the years, they change out the little car. Once it was a train.)
#camping #chronicles #grocery #store a #gallon #away -
From camp it can be a 25 minute drive to a supermarket. Here, see the dirt road before the highway. Then the grocery, still “Rob’s” - but he’s passed.
Before he died he left it to the workers, as I understand, since now the sign in the deli says “employee owned “ where a picture of Rob used to hang.
A true “commie grocery” in deep red Pennsylvania, and no Zohran in sight.
(Over the years, they change out the little car. Once it was a train.)
#camping #chronicles #grocery #store a #gallon #away -
From camp it can be a 25 minute drive to a supermarket. Here, see the dirt road before the highway. Then the grocery, still “Rob’s” - but he’s passed.
Before he died he left it to the workers, as I understand, since now the sign in the deli says “employee owned “ where a picture of Rob used to hang.
A true “commie grocery” in deep red Pennsylvania, and no Zohran in sight.
(Over the years, they change out the little car. Once it was a train.)
#camping #chronicles #grocery #store a #gallon #away -
From camp it can be a 25 minute drive to a supermarket. Here, see the dirt road before the highway. Then the grocery, still “Rob’s” - but he’s passed.
Before he died he left it to the workers, as I understand, since now the sign in the deli says “employee owned “ where a picture of Rob used to hang.
A true “commie grocery” in deep red Pennsylvania, and no Zohran in sight.
(Over the years, they change out the little car. Once it was a train.)
#camping #chronicles #grocery #store a #gallon #away -
Quarters and groceries acquired.
Ive noticed for a while now, smaller packs are cheaper per unit a lotta the time.
Per unit, medium, the ones ya usually get, are highest. Big sizes, next cheaper, and smallest cheapest. Like just now, I needed some cheese, shredded would be nice, and across all blocks and bags, small shredded bags was considerably less per oz.
I think its a psychological game which probably works...
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Quarters and groceries acquired.
Ive noticed for a while now, smaller packs are cheaper per unit a lotta the time.
Per unit, medium, the ones ya usually get, are highest. Big sizes, next cheaper, and smallest cheapest. Like just now, I needed some cheese, shredded would be nice, and across all blocks and bags, small shredded bags was considerably less per oz.
I think its a psychological game which probably works...
-
Quarters and groceries acquired.
Ive noticed for a while now, smaller packs are cheaper per unit a lotta the time.
Per unit, medium, the ones ya usually get, are highest. Big sizes, next cheaper, and smallest cheapest. Like just now, I needed some cheese, shredded would be nice, and across all blocks and bags, small shredded bags was considerably less per oz.
I think its a psychological game which probably works...
-
Quarters and groceries acquired.
Ive noticed for a while now, smaller packs are cheaper per unit a lotta the time.
Per unit, medium, the ones ya usually get, are highest. Big sizes, next cheaper, and smallest cheapest. Like just now, I needed some cheese, shredded would be nice, and across all blocks and bags, small shredded bags was considerably less per oz.
I think its a psychological game which probably works...
-
Quarters and groceries acquired.
Ive noticed for a while now, smaller packs are cheaper per unit a lotta the time.
Per unit, medium, the ones ya usually get, are highest. Big sizes, next cheaper, and smallest cheapest. Like just now, I needed some cheese, shredded would be nice, and across all blocks and bags, small shredded bags was considerably less per oz.
I think its a psychological game which probably works...
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the mustang boss 429 is back, probably a fun car to drive #grocery getter
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the mustang boss 429 is back, probably a fun car to drive #grocery getter
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the mustang boss 429 is back, probably a fun car to drive #grocery getter
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the mustang boss 429 is back, probably a fun car to drive #grocery getter
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https://www.europesays.com/ie/640264/ 1.5 Million Egg Cartons Recalled—FDA Designates Alert As ‘High Risk’ #breakfast #Business #egg #Éire #food #grocery #IE #Ireland #Kroger #recall #Salmonella #store
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Digital payments at core — Here’s what Gen Z’s UPI payments for essentials, discretionary, travel and subscriptions show
Analysis of millions of UPI transactions, reflecting the spending habits of more tha…
#NewsBeep #News #Mobile #AU #Australia #Bills #digitalpayments #Entertainment #everydayessentials #everydayspending #FinancialServices #food #genzspending #genz #Grocery #payments #Shopping #spending #subscriptions #Technology #travel #UPI #UPItransactions
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/856891/ -
Digital payments at core — Here’s what Gen Z’s UPI payments for essentials, discretionary, travel and subscriptions show
Analysis of millions of UPI transactions, reflecting the spending habits of more tha…
#NewsBeep #News #Mobile #AU #Australia #Bills #digitalpayments #Entertainment #everydayessentials #everydayspending #FinancialServices #food #genzspending #genz #Grocery #payments #Shopping #spending #subscriptions #Technology #travel #UPI #UPItransactions
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/856891/ -
Digital payments at core — Here’s what Gen Z’s UPI payments for essentials, discretionary, travel and subscriptions show
Analysis of millions of UPI transactions, reflecting the spending habits of more…
#NewsBeep #News #Mobile #Bills #digitalpayments #Entertainment #everydayessentials #everydayspending #FinancialServices #food #genzspending #GenZ #Grocery #Payments #Shopping #spending #subscriptions #Technology #travel #UK #UnitedKingdom #UPI #UPItransactions
https://www.newsbeep.com/uk/739386/ -
https://www.europesays.com/ie/639532/ Digital payments at core — Here’s what Gen Z’s UPI payments for essentials, discretionary, travel and subscriptions show #Bills #DigitalPayments #Éire #Entertainment #EverydayEssentials #EverydaySpending #FinancialServices #food #GenZSpending #genz #grocery #IE #Ireland #Mobile #Payments #shopping #spending #subscriptions #Technology #travel #UPI #UPITransactions
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https://www.europesays.com/uk/1151087/ Digital payments at core — Here’s what Gen Z’s UPI payments for essentials, discretionary, travel and subscriptions show #Bills #DigitalPayments #Entertainment #EverydayEssentials #EverydaySpending #FinancialServices #Food #GenZSpending #GenZ #grocery #Mobile #payments #Shopping #spending #subscriptions #Technology #Travel #UK #UnitedKingdom #UPI #UPITransactions
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Could a ‘land blocking’ rule change spell danger for Aldi and Lidl?
Thursday 13 August 2026 10:09 am Asda and Morrisons lost market share in recent years (Andrew M…
#Germany #DE #Europe #EU #Europa #Aldi #Asda #Business #CMA #competitionandmarketsauthority(cma) #discountgrocer #grocer #groceries #grocers #Grocery #lidl #Morrisons #News #retail #Sainsbury's #Süd&Nord #supermarket #supermarketgiants #Supermarkets #Tesco #uksupermarket #uksupermarkets
https://www.europesays.com/germany/71623/ -
For those talking about #grocery prices (later half of the podcast talks about this several decades history; 1980s almost all towns at at least one grocery store, lots of towns had two grocery stores; even ones that had populations of less than 1,000 people! If you had more population then chances are you had more than two). Also covers in the first half price raising by the mega cooperation Walmart,
which raises prices everywhere else too.https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/monopoly-power-and-grocery-affordability
@pluralistic
@seanalan -
For those talking about #grocery prices (later half of the podcast talks about this several decades history; 1980s almost all towns at at least one grocery store, lots of towns had two grocery stores; even ones that had populations of less than 1,000 people! If you had more population then chances are you had more than two). Also covers in the first half price raising by the mega cooperation Walmart,
which raises prices everywhere else too.https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/monopoly-power-and-grocery-affordability
@pluralistic
@seanalan -
For those talking about #grocery prices (later half of the podcast talks about this several decades history; 1980s almost all towns at at least one grocery store, lots of towns had two grocery stores; even ones that had populations of less than 1,000 people! If you had more population then chances are you had more than two). Also covers in the first half price raising by the mega cooperation Walmart,
which raises prices everywhere else too.https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/monopoly-power-and-grocery-affordability
@pluralistic
@seanalan -
For those talking about #grocery prices (later half of the podcast talks about this several decades history; 1980s almost all towns at at least one grocery store, lots of towns had two grocery stores; even ones that had populations of less than 1,000 people! If you had more population then chances are you had more than two). Also covers in the first half price raising by the mega cooperation Walmart,
which raises prices everywhere else too.https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/monopoly-power-and-grocery-affordability
@pluralistic
@seanalan -
For those talking about #grocery prices (later half of the podcast talks about this several decades history; 1980s almost all towns at at least one grocery store, lots of towns had two grocery stores; even ones that had populations of less than 1,000 people! If you had more population then chances are you had more than two). Also covers in the first half price raising by the mega cooperation Walmart,
which raises prices everywhere else too.https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/monopoly-power-and-grocery-affordability
@pluralistic
@seanalan -
Falling Gas Prices Fail to Break the Cutback Economy https://www.byteseu.com/2269258/ #ConsumerPriceIndex #ConsumerSpending #economy #grocery #Inflation #News #PYMNTSNews #PYMNTSStudy
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The Best Store-Bought Pasta Sauce, Tested and Reviewed (2026)
The best jarred marinara starts with, you guessed it, bright tomato flavor, balanced acidity, a hint of sweetness, and herbs that add complexity without stealing …
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Italiancooking #Cooking #grocery #Italia #Italian #italianamerican #italiancooking #italiano #italy #Pasta #RedSauce #sauce #tastetest #Tomato
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2766426/the-best-store-bought-pasta-sauce-tested-and-reviewed-2026/ -
The Best Store-Bought Pasta Sauce, Tested and Reviewed (2026)
The best jarred marinara starts with, you guessed it, bright tomato flavor, balanced acidity, a hint of sweetness, and herbs that add complexity without stealing …
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Italiancooking #Cooking #grocery #Italia #Italian #italianamerican #italiancooking #italiano #italy #Pasta #RedSauce #sauce #tastetest #Tomato
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2766426/the-best-store-bought-pasta-sauce-tested-and-reviewed-2026/ -
The Best Store-Bought Pasta Sauce, Tested and Reviewed (2026)
The best jarred marinara starts with, you guessed it, bright tomato flavor, balanced acidity, a hint of sweetness, and herbs that add complexity without stealing …
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Italiancooking #Cooking #grocery #Italia #Italian #italianamerican #italiancooking #italiano #italy #Pasta #RedSauce #sauce #tastetest #Tomato
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2766426/the-best-store-bought-pasta-sauce-tested-and-reviewed-2026/ -
The Best Store-Bought Pasta Sauce, Tested and Reviewed (2026)
The best jarred marinara starts with, you guessed it, bright tomato flavor, balanced acidity, a hint of sweetness, and herbs that add complexity without stealing …
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Italiancooking #Cooking #grocery #Italia #Italian #italianamerican #italiancooking #italiano #italy #Pasta #RedSauce #sauce #tastetest #Tomato
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2766426/the-best-store-bought-pasta-sauce-tested-and-reviewed-2026/ -
The Best Store-Bought Pasta Sauce, Tested and Reviewed (2026) https://www.diningandcooking.com/2766426/the-best-store-bought-pasta-sauce-tested-and-reviewed-2026/ #Cooking #grocery #Italia #Italian #ItalianAmerican #ItalianCooking #italiano #italy #Pasta #RedSauce #sauce #TasteTest #Tomato
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The Best Store-Bought Pasta Sauce, Tested and Reviewed (2026) https://www.diningandcooking.com/2766426/the-best-store-bought-pasta-sauce-tested-and-reviewed-2026/ #Cooking #grocery #Italia #Italian #ItalianAmerican #ItalianCooking #italiano #italy #Pasta #RedSauce #sauce #TasteTest #Tomato
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The Best Store-Bought Pasta Sauce, Tested and Reviewed (2026) https://www.diningandcooking.com/2766426/the-best-store-bought-pasta-sauce-tested-and-reviewed-2026/ #Cooking #grocery #Italia #Italian #ItalianAmerican #ItalianCooking #italiano #italy #Pasta #RedSauce #sauce #TasteTest #Tomato
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Trump: lower grocery prices ❌️ nap naps? ✅️
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Trump: lower grocery prices ❌️ nap naps? ✅️
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Trump: lower grocery prices ❌️ nap naps? ✅️
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Trump: lower grocery prices ❌️ nap naps? ✅️
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Trump: lower grocery prices ❌️ nap naps? ✅️
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Beloved Miami grocery store closes after 66 years to become Aldi
Historic Miami grocery store Winn-Dixie at Bird Ludlam Shopping Center has closed after 66 years to make way…
#Germany #DE #Europe #EU #Europa #Aldi #Grocery #History #nostalgia #openings&closings #shopping #Süd&Nord
https://www.europesays.com/germany/70552/ -
Instaleap Partners With SPAR Slovenia to Power Next Generation Grocery Fulfillment
Instaleap, now part of Instacart, announces a partnership with SPAR Slovenia to support the grocer’s omnichannel growth across…
#Slovenia #SI #Europe #Europa #EU #fulfillment #génération #grocery #Instaleap #next #Novice #Partners #power #slovenia #Slovenija #SPAR #TO #with
https://www.europesays.com/3181164/ -
Instaleap Partners With SPAR Slovenia to Power Next Generation Grocery Fulfillment https://www.byteseu.com/2257954/ #Fulfillment #generation #grocery #Instaleap #next #partners #power #Slovenia #SPAR #to #with
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@gaza_verified_campaigns/117053608947905167
$12 donated by a generous person Please, another floor donation so we can cover the week's needs and buy groceries for my family...🤍🍉🍉
#Grocery #marketing #help#gaza #gazaverified @gaza #Donate
https://chuffed.org/project/172267-help-our-family-of-seven-rebuild-after-losses -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@gaza_verified_campaigns/117053608947905167
$12 donated by a generous person Please, another floor donation so we can cover the week's needs and buy groceries for my family...🤍🍉🍉
#Grocery #marketing #help#gaza #gazaverified @gaza #Donate
https://chuffed.org/project/172267-help-our-family-of-seven-rebuild-after-losses -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@gaza_verified_campaigns/117053608947905167
$12 donated by a generous person Please, another floor donation so we can cover the week's needs and buy groceries for my family...🤍🍉🍉
#Grocery #marketing #help#gaza #gazaverified @gaza #Donate
https://chuffed.org/project/172267-help-our-family-of-seven-rebuild-after-losses -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@gaza_verified_campaigns/117053608947905167
$12 donated by a generous person Please, another floor donation so we can cover the week's needs and buy groceries for my family...🤍🍉🍉
#Grocery #marketing #help#gaza #gazaverified @gaza #Donate
https://chuffed.org/project/172267-help-our-family-of-seven-rebuild-after-losses -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@gaza_verified_campaigns/117053608947905167
$12 donated by a generous person Please, another floor donation so we can cover the week's needs and buy groceries for my family...🤍🍉🍉
#Grocery #marketing #help#gaza #gazaverified @gaza #Donate
https://chuffed.org/project/172267-help-our-family-of-seven-rebuild-after-losses -
Lynn welcomes ALDI on Boston Street
LYNN — Residents now have a new place to shop for groceries as ALDI on Boston Street opened…
#Germany #DE #Europe #EU #Europa #Aldi #BostonStreet #Grocery #Süd&Nord
https://www.europesays.com/germany/67547/ -
“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.'”*…
As Max Burns reports, a wave of corporate consolidation is reshaping the grocery industry; today, the U.S. has one-third fewer grocery stores than it did 25 years ago. The result is that just four corporations—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons—control more than two-thirds of the U.S. grocery market, This is squeezing workers, limiting competition, and giving this handful of retailers unprecedented control over what Americans pay for food…
If it feels to you like American consumers have fewer choices than ever before, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. Federal regulators are approving corporate mega-mergers at the fastest rate since the 1980s. Consumers are feeling those industry-spanning consolidations everywhere, as hardly a sector of American life has escaped Wall Street’s goal of building the largest and most powerful corporate conglomerates in world history.
From power utilities and artificial intelligence to broadcast news networks and railroads, a few massive corporate players have come to dominate American commercial life in ways not seen since the Gilded Age trusts of the 19th century. Those consolidations have generated historic profits for executives and major shareholders while working families are faced with lower quality goods and services, fewer options, and a hostile labor market unfairly skewed toward the interests of the ultra-rich.
Democrats have been quick to criticize some of the nation’s biggest mergers as anti-worker and anti-consumer, but one critical sector of the U.S. economy has managed to escape widespread public criticism: grocery stores. Thanks to a record rise in special interest cash donations to both Democrats and Republicans, grocery-industry lobby groups have managed to keep prices high, wages low, and consumer choice limited while avoiding federal policymakers’ crosshairs. The result is an invisible crisis in the nation’s food industry that threatens to reshape how and what Americans eat.
In a corporate landscape defined by Republican deregulation, America’s grocery stores and food suppliers are consolidating despite active federal laws explicitly intended to prevent anticompetitive behavior. Perhaps the most important of those laws is the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, or RPA, also known as the Anti-Price Discrimination Act. For decades, RPA ensured fair competition by banning food suppliers from charging different prices to different stores; at least it did until the Reagan-era Federal Trade Commission largely stopped enforcing it in the 1980s. Even though RPA is still the law of the land, food suppliers like Pepsi now routinely ignore the law without consequence.
“Big corporations have buying power, and they can oppress and dictate to producers what they want to pay for crops,” Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos told me. “A corporation can come to a farmer and say ‘we’ll pay you this price for potatoes, but you can’t give that price to anyone else,’ so they fix prices in a way that hurts independent supermarkets and independent businesses.”
Megacorporations aren’t subtle about flexing their market power to fix prices in ways that protect other megacorporations. Last year President Donald Trump’s FTC dismissed an RPA claim against PepsiCo which alleged that Pepsi illegally offered grocery chain Walmart unfair pricing discounts while charging smaller chains more for the same products. When independent grocery stores undercut Walmart by lowering the price of Pepsi products, PepsiCo allegedly responded by raising wholesale prices or refusing to do business with the smaller stores until they raised prices above those at Walmart.
As independent grocery stores struggle, they become more likely to sell out to larger national chains, leading to consolidation that makes both prices and employee wages less competitive. As president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 3000, Faye Guenther represents over 50,000 grocery and retail workers across the Pacific Northwest. Guenther has spent years fighting the growing imbalance between rising prices and falling wages. Now, she says, things have reached a crisis point for regular Americans…
Read on for Burns’ looks at the impact on workers (TLDR: fewer jobs, lower wages), availability of stores (TDLR: or its opposite, food deserts), and food prices (TLDR: they’re rising), and for his suggested remedies.
The painful reality behind the joke “I’m getting stronger with age. I can now lift $100 worth of groceries with one hand!”: “America’s Grocery Monopoly Problem,” from @themaxburns.bsky.social in @damemagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “Grocery Retail: The Last Link in the Monopoly Chain.”
Also apposite: “Big Food Versus the People” (what court battles reveal about the ultra-processed food industry’s corporate litigation strategies). Further to which: “Is the recycling symbol free speech? A judge just ruled it could be“…
A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.
In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.
The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away — could bear the chasing arrows.
Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court….
Of course, there’s always eating out… but of course, that’s got its own issues: “The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition,” gift article from @economist.com.
Oh, and we might note that this is National Farmers Market Week.
* Steven Wright
###
As we chow down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that the officially-adjudicated “first supermarket” opened: King Kullen in Queens, New York.
Grocery chains had been around since 1859, when The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was established. But they rarely sold fresh meat or produce and relied on the old mercantile system of clerks puling items from shelves on request. As long-time readers may recall, the first self-service grocery store was the Piggly Wiggly, which shifted to self-serve in 1916.
The first modern supermarkets appeared just over twenty years later, offering a full range of food items, beverages, and household items under one self-service roof, often with an emphasis on low prices as well as convenience. There were a number of contenders for the “first supermarket” crown…
#acquisitions #business #consolidation #culture #Food #foodDesert #foodPrices #grocery #groceryIndustry #groceryStore #history #KingKullen #labor #mergers #Monopoly #oligopoly #Retail #supermarketTo end the debate, the Food Marketing Institute in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from H.J. Heinz, researched the issue. They defined the attributes of a supermarket as “self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing and volume selling.” They determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City. The store King Kullen, operated under the logic of “pile it high and sell it cheap.” The store layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the concept of customers using baskets to collect groceries before checking out at a counter. Everything displayed for sale in the store “had prices clearly marked”, meaning that consumers would no longer need to haggle over prices. Cullen described his store as “the world’s greatest price wrecker.” At the time of his death in 1936, there were seventeen King Kullen stores in operation. Although Saunders had brought the world self-service, uniform stores, and nationwide marketing, Cullen built on this idea by adding separate food departments, selling large volumes of food at discount prices and adding a parking lot. Moreover, the supermarket format as pioneered by King Kullen was not only cheap, but convenient, in how it combined so many different departments under one roof which had formerly required trips to separate stores. – source
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“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.'”*…
As Max Burns reports, a wave of corporate consolidation is reshaping the grocery industry; today, the U.S. has one-third fewer grocery stores than it did 25 years ago. The result is that just four corporations—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons—control more than two-thirds of the U.S. grocery market, This is squeezing workers, limiting competition, and giving this handful of retailers unprecedented control over what Americans pay for food…
If it feels to you like American consumers have fewer choices than ever before, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. Federal regulators are approving corporate mega-mergers at the fastest rate since the 1980s. Consumers are feeling those industry-spanning consolidations everywhere, as hardly a sector of American life has escaped Wall Street’s goal of building the largest and most powerful corporate conglomerates in world history.
From power utilities and artificial intelligence to broadcast news networks and railroads, a few massive corporate players have come to dominate American commercial life in ways not seen since the Gilded Age trusts of the 19th century. Those consolidations have generated historic profits for executives and major shareholders while working families are faced with lower quality goods and services, fewer options, and a hostile labor market unfairly skewed toward the interests of the ultra-rich.
Democrats have been quick to criticize some of the nation’s biggest mergers as anti-worker and anti-consumer, but one critical sector of the U.S. economy has managed to escape widespread public criticism: grocery stores. Thanks to a record rise in special interest cash donations to both Democrats and Republicans, grocery-industry lobby groups have managed to keep prices high, wages low, and consumer choice limited while avoiding federal policymakers’ crosshairs. The result is an invisible crisis in the nation’s food industry that threatens to reshape how and what Americans eat.
In a corporate landscape defined by Republican deregulation, America’s grocery stores and food suppliers are consolidating despite active federal laws explicitly intended to prevent anticompetitive behavior. Perhaps the most important of those laws is the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, or RPA, also known as the Anti-Price Discrimination Act. For decades, RPA ensured fair competition by banning food suppliers from charging different prices to different stores; at least it did until the Reagan-era Federal Trade Commission largely stopped enforcing it in the 1980s. Even though RPA is still the law of the land, food suppliers like Pepsi now routinely ignore the law without consequence.
“Big corporations have buying power, and they can oppress and dictate to producers what they want to pay for crops,” Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos told me. “A corporation can come to a farmer and say ‘we’ll pay you this price for potatoes, but you can’t give that price to anyone else,’ so they fix prices in a way that hurts independent supermarkets and independent businesses.”
Megacorporations aren’t subtle about flexing their market power to fix prices in ways that protect other megacorporations. Last year President Donald Trump’s FTC dismissed an RPA claim against PepsiCo which alleged that Pepsi illegally offered grocery chain Walmart unfair pricing discounts while charging smaller chains more for the same products. When independent grocery stores undercut Walmart by lowering the price of Pepsi products, PepsiCo allegedly responded by raising wholesale prices or refusing to do business with the smaller stores until they raised prices above those at Walmart.
As independent grocery stores struggle, they become more likely to sell out to larger national chains, leading to consolidation that makes both prices and employee wages less competitive. As president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 3000, Faye Guenther represents over 50,000 grocery and retail workers across the Pacific Northwest. Guenther has spent years fighting the growing imbalance between rising prices and falling wages. Now, she says, things have reached a crisis point for regular Americans…
Read on for Burns’ looks at the impact on workers (TLDR: fewer jobs, lower wages), availability of stores (TDLR: or its opposite, food deserts), and food prices (TLDR: they’re rising), and for his suggested remedies.
The painful reality behind the joke “I’m getting stronger with age. I can now lift $100 worth of groceries with one hand!”: “America’s Grocery Monopoly Problem,” from @themaxburns.bsky.social in @damemagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “Grocery Retail: The Last Link in the Monopoly Chain.”
Also apposite: “Big Food Versus the People” (what court battles reveal about the ultra-processed food industry’s corporate litigation strategies). Further to which: “Is the recycling symbol free speech? A judge just ruled it could be“…
A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.
In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.
The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away — could bear the chasing arrows.
Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court….
Of course, there’s always eating out… but of course, that’s got its own issues: “The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition,” gift article from @economist.com.
Oh, and we might note that this is National Farmers Market Week.
* Steven Wright
###
As we chow down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that the officially-adjudicated “first supermarket” opened: King Kullen in Queens, New York.
Grocery chains had been around since 1859, when The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was established. But they rarely sold fresh meat or produce and relied on the old mercantile system of clerks puling items from shelves on request. As long-time readers may recall, the first self-service grocery store was the Piggly Wiggly, which shifted to self-serve in 1916.
The first modern supermarkets appeared just over twenty years later, offering a full range of food items, beverages, and household items under one self-service roof, often with an emphasis on low prices as well as convenience. There were a number of contenders for the “first supermarket” crown…
#acquisitions #business #consolidation #culture #Food #foodDesert #foodPrices #grocery #groceryIndustry #groceryStore #history #KingKullen #labor #mergers #Monopoly #oligopoly #Retail #supermarketTo end the debate, the Food Marketing Institute in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from H.J. Heinz, researched the issue. They defined the attributes of a supermarket as “self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing and volume selling.” They determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City. The store King Kullen, operated under the logic of “pile it high and sell it cheap.” The store layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the concept of customers using baskets to collect groceries before checking out at a counter. Everything displayed for sale in the store “had prices clearly marked”, meaning that consumers would no longer need to haggle over prices. Cullen described his store as “the world’s greatest price wrecker.” At the time of his death in 1936, there were seventeen King Kullen stores in operation. Although Saunders had brought the world self-service, uniform stores, and nationwide marketing, Cullen built on this idea by adding separate food departments, selling large volumes of food at discount prices and adding a parking lot. Moreover, the supermarket format as pioneered by King Kullen was not only cheap, but convenient, in how it combined so many different departments under one roof which had formerly required trips to separate stores. – source
-
“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.'”*…
As Max Burns reports, a wave of corporate consolidation is reshaping the grocery industry; today, the U.S. has one-third fewer grocery stores than it did 25 years ago. The result is that just four corporations—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons—control more than two-thirds of the U.S. grocery market, This is squeezing workers, limiting competition, and giving this handful of retailers unprecedented control over what Americans pay for food…
If it feels to you like American consumers have fewer choices than ever before, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. Federal regulators are approving corporate mega-mergers at the fastest rate since the 1980s. Consumers are feeling those industry-spanning consolidations everywhere, as hardly a sector of American life has escaped Wall Street’s goal of building the largest and most powerful corporate conglomerates in world history.
From power utilities and artificial intelligence to broadcast news networks and railroads, a few massive corporate players have come to dominate American commercial life in ways not seen since the Gilded Age trusts of the 19th century. Those consolidations have generated historic profits for executives and major shareholders while working families are faced with lower quality goods and services, fewer options, and a hostile labor market unfairly skewed toward the interests of the ultra-rich.
Democrats have been quick to criticize some of the nation’s biggest mergers as anti-worker and anti-consumer, but one critical sector of the U.S. economy has managed to escape widespread public criticism: grocery stores. Thanks to a record rise in special interest cash donations to both Democrats and Republicans, grocery-industry lobby groups have managed to keep prices high, wages low, and consumer choice limited while avoiding federal policymakers’ crosshairs. The result is an invisible crisis in the nation’s food industry that threatens to reshape how and what Americans eat.
In a corporate landscape defined by Republican deregulation, America’s grocery stores and food suppliers are consolidating despite active federal laws explicitly intended to prevent anticompetitive behavior. Perhaps the most important of those laws is the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, or RPA, also known as the Anti-Price Discrimination Act. For decades, RPA ensured fair competition by banning food suppliers from charging different prices to different stores; at least it did until the Reagan-era Federal Trade Commission largely stopped enforcing it in the 1980s. Even though RPA is still the law of the land, food suppliers like Pepsi now routinely ignore the law without consequence.
“Big corporations have buying power, and they can oppress and dictate to producers what they want to pay for crops,” Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos told me. “A corporation can come to a farmer and say ‘we’ll pay you this price for potatoes, but you can’t give that price to anyone else,’ so they fix prices in a way that hurts independent supermarkets and independent businesses.”
Megacorporations aren’t subtle about flexing their market power to fix prices in ways that protect other megacorporations. Last year President Donald Trump’s FTC dismissed an RPA claim against PepsiCo which alleged that Pepsi illegally offered grocery chain Walmart unfair pricing discounts while charging smaller chains more for the same products. When independent grocery stores undercut Walmart by lowering the price of Pepsi products, PepsiCo allegedly responded by raising wholesale prices or refusing to do business with the smaller stores until they raised prices above those at Walmart.
As independent grocery stores struggle, they become more likely to sell out to larger national chains, leading to consolidation that makes both prices and employee wages less competitive. As president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 3000, Faye Guenther represents over 50,000 grocery and retail workers across the Pacific Northwest. Guenther has spent years fighting the growing imbalance between rising prices and falling wages. Now, she says, things have reached a crisis point for regular Americans…
Read on for Burns’ looks at the impact on workers (TLDR: fewer jobs, lower wages), availability of stores (TDLR: or its opposite, food deserts), and food prices (TLDR: they’re rising), and for his suggested remedies.
The painful reality behind the joke “I’m getting stronger with age. I can now lift $100 worth of groceries with one hand!”: “America’s Grocery Monopoly Problem,” from @themaxburns.bsky.social in @damemagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “Grocery Retail: The Last Link in the Monopoly Chain.”
Also apposite: “Big Food Versus the People” (what court battles reveal about the ultra-processed food industry’s corporate litigation strategies). Further to which: “Is the recycling symbol free speech? A judge just ruled it could be“…
A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.
In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.
The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away — could bear the chasing arrows.
Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court….
Of course, there’s always eating out… but of course, that’s got its own issues: “The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition,” gift article from @economist.com.
Oh, and we might note that this is National Farmers Market Week.
* Steven Wright
###
As we chow down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that the officially-adjudicated “first supermarket” opened: King Kullen in Queens, New York.
Grocery chains had been around since 1859, when The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was established. But they rarely sold fresh meat or produce and relied on the old mercantile system of clerks puling items from shelves on request. As long-time readers may recall, the first self-service grocery store was the Piggly Wiggly, which shifted to self-serve in 1916.
The first modern supermarkets appeared just over twenty years later, offering a full range of food items, beverages, and household items under one self-service roof, often with an emphasis on low prices as well as convenience. There were a number of contenders for the “first supermarket” crown…
#business #consolidation #culture #Food #foodDesrt #foodPrices #grocery #groceryIndustry #groceryStore #history #KingKullen #labor #Monopoly #oligopoly #Retail #supermarketTo end the debate, the Food Marketing Institute in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from H.J. Heinz, researched the issue. They defined the attributes of a supermarket as “self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing and volume selling.” They determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City. The store King Kullen, operated under the logic of “pile it high and sell it cheap.” The store layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the concept of customers using baskets to collect groceries before checking out at a counter. Everything displayed for sale in the store “had prices clearly marked”, meaning that consumers would no longer need to haggle over prices. Cullen described his store as “the world’s greatest price wrecker.” At the time of his death in 1936, there were seventeen King Kullen stores in operation. Although Saunders had brought the world self-service, uniform stores, and nationwide marketing, Cullen built on this idea by adding separate food departments, selling large volumes of food at discount prices and adding a parking lot. Moreover, the supermarket format as pioneered by King Kullen was not only cheap, but convenient, in how it combined so many different departments under one roof which had formerly required trips to separate stores. – source
-
“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.'”*…
As Max Burns reports, a wave of corporate consolidation is reshaping the grocery industry; today, the U.S. has one-third fewer grocery stores than it did 25 years ago. The result is that just four corporations—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons—control more than two-thirds of the U.S. grocery market, This is squeezing workers, limiting competition, and giving this handful of retailers unprecedented control over what Americans pay for food…
If it feels to you like American consumers have fewer choices than ever before, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. Federal regulators are approving corporate mega-mergers at the fastest rate since the 1980s. Consumers are feeling those industry-spanning consolidations everywhere, as hardly a sector of American life has escaped Wall Street’s goal of building the largest and most powerful corporate conglomerates in world history.
From power utilities and artificial intelligence to broadcast news networks and railroads, a few massive corporate players have come to dominate American commercial life in ways not seen since the Gilded Age trusts of the 19th century. Those consolidations have generated historic profits for executives and major shareholders while working families are faced with lower quality goods and services, fewer options, and a hostile labor market unfairly skewed toward the interests of the ultra-rich.
Democrats have been quick to criticize some of the nation’s biggest mergers as anti-worker and anti-consumer, but one critical sector of the U.S. economy has managed to escape widespread public criticism: grocery stores. Thanks to a record rise in special interest cash donations to both Democrats and Republicans, grocery-industry lobby groups have managed to keep prices high, wages low, and consumer choice limited while avoiding federal policymakers’ crosshairs. The result is an invisible crisis in the nation’s food industry that threatens to reshape how and what Americans eat.
In a corporate landscape defined by Republican deregulation, America’s grocery stores and food suppliers are consolidating despite active federal laws explicitly intended to prevent anticompetitive behavior. Perhaps the most important of those laws is the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, or RPA, also known as the Anti-Price Discrimination Act. For decades, RPA ensured fair competition by banning food suppliers from charging different prices to different stores; at least it did until the Reagan-era Federal Trade Commission largely stopped enforcing it in the 1980s. Even though RPA is still the law of the land, food suppliers like Pepsi now routinely ignore the law without consequence.
“Big corporations have buying power, and they can oppress and dictate to producers what they want to pay for crops,” Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos told me. “A corporation can come to a farmer and say ‘we’ll pay you this price for potatoes, but you can’t give that price to anyone else,’ so they fix prices in a way that hurts independent supermarkets and independent businesses.”
Megacorporations aren’t subtle about flexing their market power to fix prices in ways that protect other megacorporations. Last year President Donald Trump’s FTC dismissed an RPA claim against PepsiCo which alleged that Pepsi illegally offered grocery chain Walmart unfair pricing discounts while charging smaller chains more for the same products. When independent grocery stores undercut Walmart by lowering the price of Pepsi products, PepsiCo allegedly responded by raising wholesale prices or refusing to do business with the smaller stores until they raised prices above those at Walmart.
As independent grocery stores struggle, they become more likely to sell out to larger national chains, leading to consolidation that makes both prices and employee wages less competitive. As president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 3000, Faye Guenther represents over 50,000 grocery and retail workers across the Pacific Northwest. Guenther has spent years fighting the growing imbalance between rising prices and falling wages. Now, she says, things have reached a crisis point for regular Americans…
Read on for Burns’ looks at the impact on workers (TLDR: fewer jobs, lower wages), availability of stores (TDLR: or its opposite, food deserts), and food prices (TLDR: they’re rising), and for his suggested remedies.
The painful reality behind the joke “I’m getting stronger with age. I can now lift $100 worth of groceries with one hand!”: “America’s Grocery Monopoly Problem,” from @themaxburns.bsky.social in @damemagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “Grocery Retail: The Last Link in the Monopoly Chain.”
Also apposite: “Big Food Versus the People” (what court battles reveal about the ultra-processed food industry’s corporate litigation strategies). Further to which: “Is the recycling symbol free speech? A judge just ruled it could be“…
A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.
In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.
The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away — could bear the chasing arrows.
Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court….
Of course, there’s always eating out… but of course, that’s got its own issues: “The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition,” gift article from @economist.com.
Oh, and we might note that this is National Farmers Market Week.
* Steven Wright
###
As we chow down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that the officially-adjudicated “first supermarket” opened: King Kullen in Queens, New York.
Grocery chains had been around since 1859, when The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was established. But they rarely sold fresh meat or produce and relied on the old mercantile system of clerks puling items from shelves on request. As long-time readers may recall, the first self-service grocery store was the Piggly Wiggly, which shifted to self-serve in 1916.
The first modern supermarkets appeared just over twenty years later, offering a full range of food items, beverages, and household items under one self-service roof, often with an emphasis on low prices as well as convenience. There were a number of contenders for the “first supermarket” crown…
#business #consolidation #culture #Food #foodDesrt #foodPrices #grocery #groceryIndustry #groceryStore #history #KingKullen #labor #Monopoly #oligopoly #Retail #supermarketTo end the debate, the Food Marketing Institute in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from H.J. Heinz, researched the issue. They defined the attributes of a supermarket as “self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing and volume selling.” They determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City. The store King Kullen, operated under the logic of “pile it high and sell it cheap.” The store layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the concept of customers using baskets to collect groceries before checking out at a counter. Everything displayed for sale in the store “had prices clearly marked”, meaning that consumers would no longer need to haggle over prices. Cullen described his store as “the world’s greatest price wrecker.” At the time of his death in 1936, there were seventeen King Kullen stores in operation. Although Saunders had brought the world self-service, uniform stores, and nationwide marketing, Cullen built on this idea by adding separate food departments, selling large volumes of food at discount prices and adding a parking lot. Moreover, the supermarket format as pioneered by King Kullen was not only cheap, but convenient, in how it combined so many different departments under one roof which had formerly required trips to separate stores. – source
-
“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.'”*…
As Max Burns reports, a wave of corporate consolidation is reshaping the grocery industry; today, the U.S. has one-third fewer grocery stores than it did 25 years ago. The result is that just four corporations—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons—control more than two-thirds of the U.S. grocery market, This is squeezing workers, limiting competition, and giving this handful of retailers unprecedented control over what Americans pay for food…
If it feels to you like American consumers have fewer choices than ever before, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. Federal regulators are approving corporate mega-mergers at the fastest rate since the 1980s. Consumers are feeling those industry-spanning consolidations everywhere, as hardly a sector of American life has escaped Wall Street’s goal of building the largest and most powerful corporate conglomerates in world history.
From power utilities and artificial intelligence to broadcast news networks and railroads, a few massive corporate players have come to dominate American commercial life in ways not seen since the Gilded Age trusts of the 19th century. Those consolidations have generated historic profits for executives and major shareholders while working families are faced with lower quality goods and services, fewer options, and a hostile labor market unfairly skewed toward the interests of the ultra-rich.
Democrats have been quick to criticize some of the nation’s biggest mergers as anti-worker and anti-consumer, but one critical sector of the U.S. economy has managed to escape widespread public criticism: grocery stores. Thanks to a record rise in special interest cash donations to both Democrats and Republicans, grocery-industry lobby groups have managed to keep prices high, wages low, and consumer choice limited while avoiding federal policymakers’ crosshairs. The result is an invisible crisis in the nation’s food industry that threatens to reshape how and what Americans eat.
In a corporate landscape defined by Republican deregulation, America’s grocery stores and food suppliers are consolidating despite active federal laws explicitly intended to prevent anticompetitive behavior. Perhaps the most important of those laws is the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, or RPA, also known as the Anti-Price Discrimination Act. For decades, RPA ensured fair competition by banning food suppliers from charging different prices to different stores; at least it did until the Reagan-era Federal Trade Commission largely stopped enforcing it in the 1980s. Even though RPA is still the law of the land, food suppliers like Pepsi now routinely ignore the law without consequence.
“Big corporations have buying power, and they can oppress and dictate to producers what they want to pay for crops,” Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos told me. “A corporation can come to a farmer and say ‘we’ll pay you this price for potatoes, but you can’t give that price to anyone else,’ so they fix prices in a way that hurts independent supermarkets and independent businesses.”
Megacorporations aren’t subtle about flexing their market power to fix prices in ways that protect other megacorporations. Last year President Donald Trump’s FTC dismissed an RPA claim against PepsiCo which alleged that Pepsi illegally offered grocery chain Walmart unfair pricing discounts while charging smaller chains more for the same products. When independent grocery stores undercut Walmart by lowering the price of Pepsi products, PepsiCo allegedly responded by raising wholesale prices or refusing to do business with the smaller stores until they raised prices above those at Walmart.
As independent grocery stores struggle, they become more likely to sell out to larger national chains, leading to consolidation that makes both prices and employee wages less competitive. As president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 3000, Faye Guenther represents over 50,000 grocery and retail workers across the Pacific Northwest. Guenther has spent years fighting the growing imbalance between rising prices and falling wages. Now, she says, things have reached a crisis point for regular Americans…
Read on for Burns’ looks at the impact on workers (TLDR: fewer jobs, lower wages), availability of stores (TDLR: or its opposite, food deserts), and food prices (TLDR: they’re rising), and for his suggested remedies.
The painful reality behind the joke “I’m getting stronger with age. I can now lift $100 worth of groceries with one hand!”: “America’s Grocery Monopoly Problem,” from @themaxburns.bsky.social in @damemagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “Grocery Retail: The Last Link in the Monopoly Chain.”
Also apposite: “Big Food Versus the People” (what court battles reveal about the ultra-processed food industry’s corporate litigation strategies). Further to which: “Is the recycling symbol free speech? A judge just ruled it could be“…
A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.
In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.
The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away — could bear the chasing arrows.
Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court….
Of course, there’s always eating out… but of course, that’s got its own issues: “The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition,” gift article from @economist.com.
Oh, and we might note that this is National Farmers Market Week.
* Steven Wright
###
As we chow down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that the officially-adjudicated “first supermarket” opened: King Kullen in Queens, New York.
Grocery chains had been around since 1859, when The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was established. But they rarely sold fresh meat or produce and relied on the old mercantile system of clerks puling items from shelves on request. As long-time readers may recall, the first self-service grocery store was the Piggly Wiggly, which shifted to self-serve in 1916.
The first modern supermarkets appeared just over twenty years later, offering a full range of food items, beverages, and household items under one self-service roof, often with an emphasis on low prices as well as convenience. There were a number of contenders for the “first supermarket” crown…
#acquisitions #business #consolidation #culture #Food #foodDesert #foodPrices #grocery #groceryIndustry #groceryStore #history #KingKullen #labor #mergers #Monopoly #oligopoly #Retail #supermarketTo end the debate, the Food Marketing Institute in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from H.J. Heinz, researched the issue. They defined the attributes of a supermarket as “self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing and volume selling.” They determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City. The store King Kullen, operated under the logic of “pile it high and sell it cheap.” The store layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the concept of customers using baskets to collect groceries before checking out at a counter. Everything displayed for sale in the store “had prices clearly marked”, meaning that consumers would no longer need to haggle over prices. Cullen described his store as “the world’s greatest price wrecker.” At the time of his death in 1936, there were seventeen King Kullen stores in operation. Although Saunders had brought the world self-service, uniform stores, and nationwide marketing, Cullen built on this idea by adding separate food departments, selling large volumes of food at discount prices and adding a parking lot. Moreover, the supermarket format as pioneered by King Kullen was not only cheap, but convenient, in how it combined so many different departments under one roof which had formerly required trips to separate stores. – source
-
Korean c-store brand Dosirak Outpost finds its place
Kristine Suh of Dosirak Outpost. | Dosirak Outpost Facebook page Dosirak Outpost always had the “convenience” part of…
#EuropeSays #Korea #KR #foodservice #grabandgo #grocery #independent #Korean #newstore #news #Retailers #snacks
https://www.europesays.com/korea/108079/ -
#MissKittyRaw
It seems that speed shopping all the way up to frantic #grocery #shopping is still in vogue even though a seemingly vast majority are not dying everyday from #Covid. A lasting phenomena of disconnection and internal panic. Such a great place to be coming from. 😱😱😱🤯🤯🤯 -
Many People Eat Too Much Protein, Researcher Warns—Here’s Why It Could Age You
Topline A review of more than 350 scientific studies published Friday found booming protein food options at grocery…
#NewsBeep #News #Health #food #GB #Grocery #healthcare #Protein #Science #study #UK #UnitedKingdom
https://www.newsbeep.com/uk/722992/