(Roughly) Daily

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

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