Big box stores cut unfair deals with suppliers, small grocers are saying, and want the FTC to enforce a 1936 law.
of how antitrust policy failed to rein in Amazon while a student at Columbia Law School.) In addition, FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya has embarked on a listening tour around the country, meeting with independent grocery stores and pharmacy operators and talking about how Robinson-Patman enforcement could help them thrive. The FTC hasrecently into whether pricing practices at Coca-Cola and PepsiCo violated Robinson-Patman, but has not yet brought a formal action.
A bipartisan group of 43 members of Congress, including representatives Hakeem Jeffries and W. Gregory Steube in March of 2022 asking it to bring more actions against companies that have violated Robinson-Patman. “The anticompetitive effects of discriminatory pricing and product supply directed to certain businesses ripple through the entire supply chain—harming consumers as well as independent producers,” they wrote in the letter.
“That was unequivocally the heart of Robinson-Patman,” says Bedoya. “That $1 spent at the local store becomes $30 within the community and that this is good for our community in a way that the chains are not.” The Robinson-Patman Act was passed in 1936 in response to the supermarket giant A&P, which was spreading across the country and putting local grocers out of business.
Many independent grocers have banded together into cooperatives so they’ll have more bargaining power. Those giant co-ops buy billions of dollars of groceries and have warehouses all around the country, just like Walmart does. Associated Wholesale Grocers, for instance, is a food co-op that serves 3,400 member supermarkets, representing $24 billion in sales. By contrast, there are 4,631 Walmarts in the U.S.
The grocers say that the discounts Walmart gets are not commensurate with the efficiencies the company creates. Many store owners have experiences like that of R.F. Buche, who owns 23 independent grocery, convenience, and hardware stores in South Dakota, including the store that Bedoya visited in Pine Ridge. He will sometimes walk into a Walmart and see lower prices on the shelves than he can get wholesale through AWG. In December, for instance, he saw Walmart selling a dozen eggs for $2.
“If we’re willing to purchase the same quantities of product as the competition, we should be afforded the same price,” says Chris Jones, senior vice president of government relations at the National Grocers Association, a trade group representing independent grocers. “But those conversations don’t even happen.”
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