The Federal Trade Commission sued to block a proposed merger between the grocery giants, saying the $24.6 billion deal would eliminate competition and lead to higher prices.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).