1. A hallmark of the dark ages of antitrust was that the agencies often went after small players for collusion if they banded together to survive against a dominant corporation. @linakhanFTC just undid part of that legacy & offered a critique of it. ftc.gov/news-events/ne… 2. During the dark years, antitrust enforcers treated anything that might be deemed collusion among small businesses or other small players as a cardinal sin — even as they viewed the exercise of market power by a single large dominant corporation as benign or even beneficial.

1. For decades, local grocery stores thrived. Then in the 1980s, the government stopped enforcing a key antitrust law. Rapid consolidation followed, giving rise to food deserts & a price spike. Our new graph shows the dramatic impact of this policy shift. ilsr.org/articles/polic… 2. Today, when growing corporate concentration seems to be an inevitable fact in every sector, it’s remarkable to look back at the grocery industry in the period from the 1930s to the 1980s.

1. The conventional explanations for food deserts—that these places are too poor or too rural to generate enough spending on groceries, or too Black to overcome racist corporate redlining—fail to grapple with a key fact: food deserts didn’t used to exist. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… 2. Poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, but food deserts arrived only in the late 1980s. Prior to that, even the smallest towns and poorest neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store — and often they had several.

1. I just read the judge’s unsealed ruling posted yesterday: The FTC’s monopolization case against Amazon survives handily and fully intact. Despite early headlines to the contrary, this is a complete win for the agency. We’re going to trial. 2. The judge finds that the FTC’s evidence is sufficient to make a reasonable inference that Amazon is liable for monopolizing the market. This was true of the agency’s various claims under the Sherman Act.

1. It’s stunning that we’ve been unable to escape Visa’s stranglehold on debit payments — despite legislation mandating competition, despite disrupters like PayPal & Apple, despite loads of businesses eager to shed the crushing fees.

The DOJ’s monopolization case explains why. 2. First, just to note: The price of Visa's stranglehold is extraordinary. It amounts to billions in fees across the economy, simply for executing transactions that have near-zero costs.

Visa makes margins 83% in the US!

1. I'm so sorry to see @jbouie fall into a trap that big corporations & the GOP have long used to weaken the left. Since the 1980s, the right has been allowed to define who small businesses are, claim their voice, and use it to drive reactionary policies.
nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opi… 2. The left has not contested this version of small business politics. In fact, it has helped the right at every turn — as Bouie is doing in this piece. This is very bad strategy. It costs progressives and ultimately costs working people.

1. Many environmental groups began taking huge donations from the Waltons — the family that owns most of Walmart — starting about 15 yrs ago.

Today our fisheries, food, and water policies have been thoroughly corrupted.

civileats.com/walanthropy/ 2. You should make time to read @CivilEats amazing series on this. "Greenwashing" doesn't do justice to what Walmart is doing; it's much more sophisticated...

1. Amazon is in a world of legal hurt — I just read the less-redacted version of the FTC’s monopoly lawsuit. Lots of evidence of Amazon execs knowingly screwing consumers & killing competition, aware of their own wrong-doing.

A few highlights. First, destroying evidence. 2. Here’s an exec saying that blocking sellers from offering lower prices on other sites is "a dirty job, but we need to do it."

1. Weird to see the FTC’s Amazon lawsuit described as restrained, a pulled punch. It’s so not that. It strikes at the core of Amazon’s monopolization strategy.

Why the disconnect? One reason is that the commonly told story of Amazon’s strategy is the wrong story. 2. The story most people know is that Amazon spies on sellers and copies their products — that Amazon’s monopoly strategy is to exploit its control over the platform to advantage its own products and sales.

This story has been chased and told by media again & again.

1. For 40 years, we’ve allowed big chains like Walmart to use their financial hold over suppliers to wrest deep discounts for themselves — while driving up the prices that small retailers pay.

This was a huge mistake, and it’s costing us all.

nytimes.com/2023/05/29/opi… 2. Walmart & Kroger “have a handle on suppliers that I can’t touch,” explains Michael Gay, owner of Food Fresh, the only grocery store in a rural stretch of Georgia. With suppliers charging Fresh Food much higher prices, the store can’t come close to matching the chains’ prices.

It’s wild how quick libertarians are to use poor people as props to legitimize corporate power.

And also to erase their agency! Laws limiting dollar stores are the result of bottom-up efforts by people to protect their neighborhoods.
1/ Often people have to fight City Hall pretty hard to get these measures passed.

Their motivation is simple and universal: Who wants to live in a neighborhood that has dozens of dollar stores and no full-service grocery store? No one.
2/

Why are Dollar General and Family Dollar so lethal to grocery stores? Why does their arrival so often leave communities with no place to buy fresh food?

The chains use 3 predatory tactics to ensure they face no competition. 1/
ilsr.org/report-dollar-… First, they open lots of stores close together. In cities, this means dozens of dollar stores concentrated in particular areas. In small towns, especially in the South, you’ll often see 2-3 dollar stores at the main intersection. 2/
ilsr.org/new-maps-dolla…

1. If you live in California and buy something online from Best Buy, 50% of the local sales tax you pay goes not to local government, but to Best Buy.

Another 10% goes to a lawyer named Robert Cendejas.

bloomberg.com/news/features/… 2. It's not just Best Buy. Walmart, Apple, QVC, and others have all cute deals with cities where they get to pocket a huge share of the sales tax from e-commerce.

This is an impressive piece of reporting by @schwahoney

1. The FTC’s action today to ban noncompete clauses will not only benefit workers. It will also provide a major boost to small businesses and entrepreneurship in two ways. A quick thread.

https://twitter.com/linakhanFTC/status/1611025895388577792

2. First, non-compete agreements act as a kind of barrier-to-entry for would-be entrepreneurs by preventing workers from leaving their jobs to start their own, competing businesses.

1. Yesterday the DOJ won a major antitrust case. A judge blocked the merger of two publishing giants — Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.

The ruling is great news for authors and readers. It’s also a big deal because of what it says about where antitrust is headed. 2. Rather than focus on the merger’s effect on consumer prices, the government instead argued that the deal would harm authors. By merging, Penguin/Simon would cut the number of major publishers from 5 to 4. With fewer houses competing for new books, authors would be paid less.

1. Walmart opened its first superstore in 1962, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that it (and other chains) exploded, killing local retailers & taking over.

What happened? The government stopped enforcing a crucial antitrust law, the Robinson-Patman Act. ilsr.org/boxed-out/ 2. Robinson-Patman says that big retailers can’t use their leverage as major buyers of goods to compel suppliers to grant them discounts and other preferences, while charging smaller retailers higher prices. ilsr.org/rule/antitrust…

A year ago this week, President Biden gave a speech in which he sharply repudiated 40 years of federal policy that favored bigness and overlooked the harm monopoly power can inflict on working people, small businesses, and communities.

1/

ilsr.org/bidens-executi… “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power. And what have we gotten from it? Less growth, weakened investment, fewer small businesses,” he said.

2/

If Chuck Schumer doesn't bring the Big Tech bills to a vote in the next 2 weeks, then one has to conclude he's corrupt.

It's the campaign cash, his daughters working for Big Tech, etc. Either that or he is wedded to further fusing the Democratic Party to Big Business, which is even worse.

The consequences of inaction are so high...

A few thoughts on Amazon's deal to add free Grubhub deliveries to Prime.

National restaurant delivery services are not viable businesses. They suffer from diseconomies of scale and can’t make a profit. (Hence all the fraud.)

1/ Grubhub and Doordash have gotten where they are by persuading investors to fund massive losses. It's a predatory pricing scheme aimed at monopolizing delivery in different metros. The idea is to become entrenched gatekeepers that can bleed restaurants even more in the future. 2/

Yes! By a 5-0 vote, the FTC has launched an inquiry into CVS and the other dominant pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).

This is a huge step — hopefully toward a fair playing field for independent pharmacies and the communities they serve. 1/

https://twitter.com/linakhanFTC/status/1534226812594704384

For a long time, PBMs have used their control over prescription benefits to undermine independent pharmacies and steer patients to their own (often lower-quality & more expensive) pharmacies instead.
2/

Last week, an Amazon VP took to an Amazon-run forum for sellers to urge them to contact their senators in opposition to Klobuchar’s self-preferencing bill, and thereby continue Amazon’s “amazing partnership” with sellers.

The responses from sellers are… pretty lively. 1/ “When a person or business issues a vaguely threatening one-sided statement, i.e., do this or else you will be put out of business… you have to stop and ask, what is the ACTUAL issue?” — happyfamilyclothing 2/