• Plap plap 𓁑𓂸 @lemmyf.uk
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    9 months ago

    Two of the major chains in my area merged a while back and they were required to close down a few of their stores to prevent having a monopoly.

    So of course they closed the stores that were under-performing, which just means they closed the ones in poor neighborhoods.

    They still owned or kept the leases to the buildings and sub-leased them out with the stipulation that any business taking them over could not carry groceries.

    Not only are the people in those areas having to drive a lot further (or spend more time on public transit), but a lot the surrounding businesses to the stores that closed down ended up going out of business themselves.

    There’s at least one nearly abandoned mini-small, shopping plaza in town due to this.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      that seems like anti competitive behavior, I wonder if those kinds of stipulations could be made illegal. Also a commercial vacancy tax probably wouldn’t hurt.

      • massacre@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        They are legal. This is/was Walmart’s M.O. for anticompetitive behavior when one of their stores closed. Any competitors couldn’t lease, other businesses failed when they moved and didn’t have the traffic, and so you are left with both an unoccupied eye sore as well as a food / product desert…

        Good idea on the vacancy and potentially changing the law to prevent anti-competitive stipulations like that.

    • deft@lemmy.wtf
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      9 months ago

      Wow never realized it but same. Clemens and Acme went under, then Superfresh. All those shopping centers are still empty or near barren and that was like well over a decade for those to go under

  • penquin@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Capitalism, where a couple of fucking dudes can make or break a whole country.

    • ceenote@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      And where being poorly suited for wielding that kind of power responsibly makes you more likely to be one of those fucking dudes.

  • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      9 months ago

      Yep, that was the conclusion I came to as well.

      Stop them building more stores at the very least.

    • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • mommykink@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I’d love to see it but this isn’t the best comparison. The total number of stores aren’t what makes a company a monopoly, it’s the ratio of one company’s market share versus its competitors.

      • MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        Fair point.

        Luckily, digging through OP’s article, I have found the data!

        Together, Kroger and Albertsons would control around 13% of the U.S. grocery market; Walmart controls 22%, according to J.P. Morgan analyst Ken Goldman.

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      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

      • pandapoo@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • TheChurn@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          Lina Khan has been extraordinarily ineffective at the head of the FTC.

          While the agency has made a lot of noise about holding big tech accountable, all they’ve managed to accomplish is losing court cases and setting even more precedent against the government’s ability to enforce anti-monopoly legislation against these companies.

          Her heart seems to be in the right place, but results matter as well.

        • STOMPYI@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Hopefully… Biden appointed some real pussycats to the SEC who also died shit about fuck all…

        • magikarpet@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          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
          • force@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            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
  • underisk@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Hope this goes better than when they tried to stop MS from buying up Activision Blizzard.

    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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      9 months ago

      Very rare pro-consumer W

      Is it though? I fear that all this will do is allow WalMart to clobber them individually then take over their market share. A&K combined are already smaller than Wally World. (13% vs 22%). It would actually be more helpful to the grocery market if they forced Walmart to divest, what their doing with this is likely to end up with Walmart taking it all.

      • JustUseMint@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I actually agree. They’re targeting the smaller fish in "big business " when they should be focusing on Walmart amazon google and the like

        • mommykink@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          The FTC has always been harsher about monopolization via mergers versus business finding success independently. Not saying that’s the right way to handle things, but Walmart got to where they are through competing, not merging, with other businesses.

  • TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Having a non-nationalized monopoly is stupid and bad.

    But being champions of free market economics, and then being shocked pikachu when the free market does free market things is even stupider. Especially when nothing is done to reign in this free market crap.

    The US wants to be socialist so bad, but can’t get their populous to vote for it because of scary words they don’t understand. Instead it’s done as a random patchwork that of course doesn’t work and corporate lobbying just makes it appear as an illusion of choice.

    Next time you’re out shopping in Walmart or Kroger or whatever look at the aisle you’re in and the choices. Let’s say cereal. 200 different choices of flavour. 50 different “brands”. In reality it’s all 1 company. There may be a couple outliers but it’s all the same company selling the same sugary processed crap giving you the illusion of choice.

  • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    I hope the lawsuit is successful. This would make them the only viable store in many areas.

  • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    Awesome. While we’re at it let’s sue Kroger/Smith’s for the absolute eyesore that is the hideous playmobil-lookin 3D people in their ads. The design is so bad it’s a public nuisance. Lol

  • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    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.

      • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • noobnarski@feddit.de
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          9 months ago

          I guess we are pretty lucky over here in Germany then. We may have had some consolidation in the last few years, but there are still quite a few different grocery store companies competing.

          The big ones are Aldi, Lidl, Rewe, Edeka, Netto, Penny and Norma. Quite a few of them own other supermarket chains as well, but those arent in my list.

          Our supermarket market is so competitive that even companies like walmart failed to enter it (they also didnt do away with weird US customs, which probably didnt help).