Very rare pro-consumer W
As a Canadian, what’s it like?
It’s like walking out of a doctor’s office without thousands of dollars in debt… I assume.
As an Australian who has to deal with the duopoly of our grocery stores after we let them all merge years ago, it absolutely will drive higher prices and nobody who isn’t a shareholder should want this.
They basically “collude” to fix and raise prices here and have whole teams of people who’s job it is to monitor and extract as much money out of us as possible. They also force growers to accept shitty deals or they reject their produce due to “not meeting their quality standards” and there’s basically nowhere else for them to sell it in the quantities they need to.
Nobody wins in grocery store mergers except the shareholders.
In Canada we have multiple chains and they collude anyway
Australia is super concentrated, the duopoly own 70% of the grocery store market as well as others like 60% of the alcohol market. The rest is made up of convenience stores (mostly one company, IGA) and Aldi, the latter having single digit percent.
You basically sell and buy groceries though these two or you don’t exist. The CEO of one of them got so cocky during a recent interview he was forced to resign over it.
With the current extreme price gouging, seems like the perfect political cover to anti-trust the hell out of them and break them up.
You’d know the Libs would moan and get the Murdoch media to pump out the propaganda, but I think the Australian public would be on board. The tax cut reversal went over totally fine, because I guess on average people aren’t as stupid as the Libs would like.
(For international readers, the Liberal Party are the leaders of the conservative coalition, confusingly.
Albertsons has been buying up competitors for a while.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertsons
Kroger has a few too:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger#Chains
They turned Pavilions from a nice store to another dingy grocery. I can’t imagine this going through would be good for consumers. Many neighborhoods only have access to 2 stores at best, and I suspect most are already owned by the same parent. A merger would further turn this into a monopoly.
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You’re not wrong, but the appointment of Lina Khan to head the FTC is easily one of the only good things Biden has done while in office.
So, at least she’ll go down kicking and screaming before they finally snuff her out, metaphorically speaking.
Honestly, i dislike his age, his stance on Israel and some other general things but overall I think Biden has accomplished a lot of good things as president.
Some examples:
- rejoined Paris Agreement
- rejoined WHO
- ends federal private prison contracts
- 130+ billion in student loan forgiveness
- Russia sanctions
- national registry for police fired for misconduct
- executive order protecting travel for abortion
- gas prices down (not all in his control but still)
- inflation reduction act
- Arguably the best post-pandemic economy in the world
Wait he did ALL that? I had absolutely 0 idea, it’s way more than I thought. Although I will add the one other thing I do know that he did:
- took major steps to removing medical debt from credit scores, including rolling out regulations prohibiting medical debt from being included on credit reports and creating standards for property owners to not consider medical debt for potential renters
Bad news sells. Good news goes unnoticed.
Hopefully… Biden appointed some real pussycats to the SEC who also died shit about fuck all…
Hell I’m in Seattle and my walkable area (about 2 mile radius for me) would be reduced to this mega corp, Amazon, and a couple Asian marts. I’ve got two corner stores nearby but their produce is usually not great and mostly they have snacks and microwavables. I suspect smaller towns or less bustling neighborhoods could easily be reduced to just this super chain and nowhere else
My 2nd closest grocery store is a 40 minute drive, and it’s a Walmart.
So rare.
My main takeaway from this article is that Walmart controls nearly twice the market share of Kroger and Albertsons combined - and needs to be broken up.
There should be automatic break ups of companies that take up too much of the market share.
A hard limit would have an effect, but companies would intentionally just barely hover under the limit. Maybe if it was a chace based thing proportional to their market share. Might be worth looking into.
Bold of them to believe they’ll stop price gouging regardless.
Shittier services and higher prices/more fees, every merger ever.
Read yesterday about Wendy’s rolling out new electronic menus this year so they can enact dynamic pricing. Can’t wait until Surge pricing hits another non-negotiable like food.
Burn all these oligarchs down.
Yhgtbsm. Charge people more during a lunch rush because it’s convenient to do so. For fast food. Fuck them.
That’s stripping the “supply” out of “supply and demand” and just making it “demand pricing.”
They demand you pay more.
Didn’t Albertson’s already merge with Safeway?
They did, yes
People are talking about combining the names. If Albertson’s and Safeway didn’t, I suspect it will be the same with Kroger.
Best to keep the names separate to create the illusion of choice.
This has been silently happening in every industry for years.
Yep! This reminds me of the infographic where almost every major food brand in the world is covered by 10 parent brands. https://www.good.is/Business/food-brands-owners-rp
The Luxottica approach.
Illusion of choice
Capitalism, where a couple of fucking dudes can make or break a whole country.
And where being poorly suited for wielding that kind of power responsibly makes you more likely to be one of those fucking dudes.
FML, I hate that this is actually the case. God damn it.
Kroger has promised to invest $500 million to lower prices as soon as the deal closes.
Kroger made 1.8 billion last year after expenses, so investing 500 million is a good gesture of faith but, I think that it should be required to be repeated yearly if they wish to make it as a condition of the merger, 500 million while likely wouldn’t do much prices wise, wouldn’t even be helpful if they aren’t doing it past the first year anyway
Surely this merger is different from all the other ones where corporations lied their asses off then jacked up prices after the merger went through, right?
I’ve got three grocery stores near my house. One is owned by Kroger and two by Albertsons. I hate to think what would happen if there were zero effective competition.
What will the new celebrity name be?
Krogertsons?
Albertger?
Grocer Monopoly
Walmart is already taken.
Absolutely. Walmart is there competition and always has been. I worked for Safeway back in the 2000s and they were always talking about Walmart.
I hope the lawsuit is successful. This would make them the only viable store in many areas.
What if the only viable store would give you better deals than 2 competing ones?
Why would that ever even happen? What incentive does a business have to stifle its own profit margins?
If it was owned by the public, then the people could do the best they can with what they have instead of the least people are willing to accept while charging the most they’re willing to pay.
It’s why all the useful idiots are against nationalization of corporations. It removes private owners who exist just to siphon profits.
It’s interesting living in a partof the USA where I couldn’t even tell you where a Kroger or Albertsons is. Maybe they don’t tend to overlap with Food Lion’s?
Hope this goes better than when they tried to stop MS from buying up Activision Blizzard.
