#oligopoly — Public Fediverse posts

“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

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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…

To 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

source

Canada is a the world leader in rigged markets that pander to MBA fck-wits: “If I was WestJet’s CEO, I would not want any competition. I would want to make it as monopolistic or duopolistic for maximizing profit,” he told the Star.
#airlines #WestJet #competition #oligopoly #rigged #consumers #corporatism #Canada #Cdnbusiness #bussiness #markets #regulations
https://www.thestar.com/business/document-shows-westjets-push-against-federal-air-passenger-rights-regulations/article_04d36601-d56e-49f9-b8a1-650bc3ef3e94.html

@Dianora So, a few thoughts on What Might be Done to correct economic thinking ....

Long and multi-part.

First part here delves more into the general failings / holes in contemporary mainstream orthodox economics.

On pricing behaviours of goods and services under typical market conditions, it's possible to read Adam Smith's chapters on prices (mostly Book I, Ch. V--XI, and Book V, Ch. II) as discussing the prices (or tax revenues) of commodities, labour, capital stock (industrial investments), rents, interest, and assets (silver & gold to Smith). These ... behave differently, and not strictly in the supply/demand model dominant in conventional orthodox economics. As noted above, even Matt Ridley, bless his heart, agrees that market valuation of assets ... behaves poorly.

Much oligarchic wealth occurs not through trade but through asset inflation. That is, it's less that someone achieves obscene wealth by selling goods/services than that the commercial-legal entity which manifests that trade itself appreciates in nominal value. Billionaires don't sit atop heaps of cash but of assets which can be denominated in cash equivalents. (Often with many levels of leverage and indirection both.) Matt Ridley, not someone with whom I generally find agreement, has noted that markets work relatively well for commerce exchange but poorly for assets (from a book, I'd run across this in an IQ2 debate w/ David Runciman and Johan Norberg: https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/the-new-optimism-with-matt-ridley-johan-norberg-david-runciman-and-laura-kuenssberg/.)

Wages and rents are two other key dynamics in that wages tend to fall to or below subsistence whilst rents tend to rise to claim all surplus beneficial value. The more one is subsidised (e.g., wage supports, rent subsidies) the worse the dynamic becomes, and this is a money-pump from workers to landlords. Tackling this requires both wage and rent-side reforms, e.g., UBI / living wage, and a wealth or land-value tax. Addressing workers' and tenants' rights is another key element, though more of politics/law than economics itself.

(Law and economics are tightly coupled in interesting ways. Hayek's training, f'rex, was in law.)

Business merger & acquisition is a huge hole in the "vote with your wallet" (a/k/a "free-market it harder") retort. That works if businesses are small, limited, and cannot buy out or otherwise crush competition, but fails utterly if in avoiding firm X by patronising firm Y, one finds X buying Y (often strictly because of customer flight, see e.g., Facebook -> Whatsapp or Amazon -> Diapers.com). Buy-and-kill is another failure mode. Both of these require remedies outside the markets, e.g., political, legal, social, or other actions.

Equivocation of wealth and profit, where wealth ("the annual produce and labour of the nation" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II/Chapter_3, which as many have noted means that wealth is a flow rather than a stock), and profit in the accounting sense (direct monetary revenues less direct monetary costs) is one of the more gaping holes in conventional economic argument. I've done some root-searching on that and find that much of the source seems to be in the cost accounting of Alexander Hamilton Church (and yes, related to that A.H.), which serves as the basis for modern accounting practice. Leo Tolstoy's What Shall We Do (a title invoked by Lenin's later book) has some interesting discussions on this.

"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power" is Smith's pithiest observation in all of WoN: The fact that economic and/or financial wealth translates to political and social power has profound impacts, and alone explains a huge part of the failings of US right-libertarian theology following from Hayek, von Mises, Rotthbard, and Nozick.

"Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (Bernard Stern, 1937) discusses one dimension of this in the resistances of established powers (economic/commercial and others) to technological innovations: https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://rentry.co/szi3g. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Value's equivocation as "market price" in contemporary discussion is another failing. I see "value" actually being three distinct elements, any of which may fail to reflect underlying reality: real cost (all necessary inputs, labour, capital, time, natural resources, effluent sinks, unwanted/unintended consequences), exchange value (price), and use value. In practice, C <= P <= UV, that is, the exchange value lies somewhere between cost and use value, though in extreme circumstances that can be violated. In particular, extractive resources tend to have P < C, that is, the price is below the total cost, especially the time-based replenishment cost, of the resource; labour wages tend to fall to subsistence, rents tend to rise to subsume all use value, asset prices ... are strange (I've not sorted my thinking on this), interest rates seem to be a mix of market and central bank effects, and public goods (in the economic definition) are those for which market prices fall well below marginal cost and use-value, and are underprovisioned absent specific subsidy, with lighthouses, education, roads, infrastructure, information, and communications being classic exemplars.

Incidentally, the whole notion of a market exchange economy fundamentally relies on the underpricing of essnetial inputs (food, energy, raw materials, labour) with excess value being extracted at further levels of economic activity (manufacture, commerce, transport, finance, management, etc.) This is the revelation of Quesnay's Tableau Économique and further explorations of tiers of economic activity (Clark & Kennessey particularly). Typical categorisation:

• Primary Activities: Agriculture, forestry and fishing; Mining
• Secondary Activities: Construction; Manufacturing
• Tertiary Activities: Transportation, electric, gas and sanitary services; Wholesale trade; Retail trade
• Quatenary Activities: Finance, insurance, and real estate; Services; Public administration

More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37414034 and https://web.archive.org/web/20230612141005/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/74dm5o/seeking_research_on_inclusive_measures_of/.

Essentially, markets fail in establishing pricing in many ways, though how these might be addressed is challenging.

I'll note that I differ with Marx in attributing all value generation to labour, though that's often a significant component.

Risk is a whole 'nother case, and I'll point out that the "FIRE" sector of finance, insurance, and real estate all have a central focus on evaluating pricing risk of a portfolio against income streams (interest payments, premium payments, mortgage payments), with a linkage that's been noted to at least the 19th century if not before. Banks and insurance are the exceptions to Smith's general strong disdain for stock corporations, though an argument can be made for socialisation of these. Many government functions fall into provision of both public goods and security services (defence, health, major catastrophe), in which markets flagrantly fail. Robert K. Merton (overt/covert functions, unintended consequences) and Charles Perrow's work illuminates much here.

Understanding of GNP/GDP is greatly assisted if it's thought of not as a way to manage and measure total economic wealth (Smithian definition), but as a monetary metric born of an age when central banking was just finding its feet. Tuning the overall money supply appropriately is necessary, but not sufficient, and was a huge obstacle to resolving the Great Depression (1929--1939).

It's not the only problem which can occur, for which a classic 1945 paper on the economy of a WWII PoW camp remains an excellent if simplified exploration: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133. Kate Raworth's Donut Economics and numerous GDP modifications and alternatives (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Proposals_to_overcome_GDP_limitations) improve on this. Simon Kuznets, GNP's creator, was well aware of its limitations, though his cautions are not only largely ignored, but difficult to find online at all (he has extensive writings, they ... are not digitised last I invested significant time in searching for them).

Thermodynamics and economics is another tremendous failing. The work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, R.U. Ayres, and more recently Steve Keene (working with Ayres) in describing how the production function is explained not merely by labour + capital, but labour, capital, and energy is so flagrantly obvious that rejection by the orthodoxy is both a manifestation of mental illness and a crime against humanity and the entire ecosphere. It ties strongly into the "wealth is power" dynamic above, as well as the distortionary effects of wealth on information, media, ideology, and scientific understanding. That last is a major component of Naomi Oreskes's work (Merchants of Doubt, The Big Myth). For the role of energy in civilisation, Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization and Energy and World History, and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power are huge eye-openers. So, somewhat ironically, is Daniel Yergin's The Prize. He's an unabashed apologist for the petroleum industry, but his history does reveal its awesome transformational influence.

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#economics #orthodoxEconomics #critique #monopoly #oligopoly #wealth #profit #value #prices #wages #WagePrice #rents #AssetValuation #AdamSmith #prices #risk #FireSector #finance #insurance #RealEstate #tootstorm

My wonderful and talented friend, @k8, made these for the May Lowblaws Boycott and said that I could share them here! Let's break 'em up and turn them into co-ops!

#Boycott #CanPoli #onpoli #Oligopoly #Monopoly #AntiTrust #WorkersDemocracy #Bread #Canada #Loblaws #ConquestOfBread #Capitalism #ConcetrationOfWealth #ThereShouldntBeBillionaires #Westons #Niagara #NiagaraON #StCatharines #STC #OurHomeSTC #NiagaraFalls #NiagaraFallsON #BoycottLoblaws #ShopLocal

My wonderful and talented friend, @k8, made these for the May Lowblaws Boycott and said that I could share them here! Let's break 'em up and turn them into co-ops!

#Boycott #CanPoli #onpoli #Oligopoly #Monopoly #AntiTrust #WorkersDemocracy #Bread #Canada #Loblaws #ConquestOfBread #Capitalism #ConcetrationOfWealth #ThereShouldntBeBillionaires #Westons #Niagara #NiagaraON #StCatharines #STC #OurHomeSTC #NiagaraFalls #NiagaraFallsON #BoycottLoblaws #ShopLocal

My wonderful and talented friend, @k8, made these for the May Lowblaws Boycott and said that I could share them here! Let's break 'em up and turn them into co-ops!

#Boycott #CanPoli #onpoli #Oligopoly #Monopoly #AntiTrust #WorkersDemocracy #Bread #Canada #Loblaws #ConquestOfBread #Capitalism #ConcetrationOfWealth #ThereShouldntBeBillionaires #Westons #Niagara #NiagaraON #StCatharines #STC #OurHomeSTC #NiagaraFalls #NiagaraFallsON #BoycottLoblaws #ShopLocal

My wonderful and talented friend, @k8, made these for the May Lowblaws Boycott and said that I could share them here! Let's break 'em up and turn them into co-ops!

#Boycott #CanPoli #onpoli #Oligopoly #Monopoly #AntiTrust #WorkersDemocracy #Bread #Canada #Loblaws #ConquestOfBread #Capitalism #ConcetrationOfWealth #ThereShouldntBeBillionaires #Westons #Niagara #NiagaraON #StCatharines #STC #OurHomeSTC #NiagaraFalls #NiagaraFallsON #BoycottLoblaws #ShopLocal

From 1990 to 2021, U.S. wine sales have grown by 60%. While E & J Gallo has always been #1, its market share has fluctuated - as has the overall market concentration measured by the HHI. After a trough ten years ago, both Gallo's share & overall market concentration have surged and peaked in 2021 (Gallo = 33.8%, HHI=0.144) #winemarket #marketconcentration #monopoly #oligopoly