New York Advances Crucial Grocery Fairness Bill

A law that will give New Yorkers the power to fight rising grocery prices and shrink food deserts is now one step closer to becoming reality.

This week, the New York State Assembly’s Consumer Affairs and Protection Committee passed the Consumer Grocery Pricing Fairness Act, a landmark bill that would help ensure independent grocers and small chain supermarkets in the state are protected from the corporate bullying of dominant supermarket chains and their powerful conglomerate suppliers. ILSR’s Ron Knox has advocated for the bill before lawmakers and staff, and submitted a memo in support of the bill ahead of the committee’s vote. 

The bill, sponsored by Assemblymember Micah Lasher and Senator Cordell Cleare, prohibits a type of predatory buying called price discrimination in the New York grocery sector. Price discrimination in this context happens when giant retailers and mega-chains use their power over suppliers to secure lower prices and other benefits, while conspiring with those suppliers to raise prices at competing, smaller stores. While the federal Robinson Patman Act has prohibited price discrimination since 1936, federal enforcers have refused to enforce the law for the past 40 years, and muddled court precedents have made enforcement difficult for private plaintiffs.

This bill aims to reverse those trends for New York’s grocery industry. As Knox wrote in his memo, the Act, if passed, would give New York’s attorney general the power “to ensure fairness within the state’s grocery market, while bright-line thresholds would ensure the law targets only the largest, most powerful retailers and suppliers operating in the state.” The law would also close two major loopholes in the Robinson-Patman Act that powerful retailers and suppliers have exploited to undermine competition: “access discrimination,” in which dominant retailers conspire with their suppliers to monopolize access to crucial products while cutting off access for smaller stores and regional chains, and “channel discrimination,” in which some kinds of stores, such as dollar stores or big box club warehouses, get preferential prices or package sizes.

Access discrimination against smaller grocers is more than just theoretical in the state. New York-based independent grocer group and bill supporters, the National Supermarket Association, say a major supplier, Nabisco and Oreo owner Mondelez International, has abruptly cut off independent stores’ ability to access its products directly, raising their costs and damaging their ability to compete. “When Independent grocers are treated differently than giant chains, the system stops being fair, and the communities that feel it most are the working class and immigrant neighborhoods independent stores have served for generations,” Association president Anthony Peña says.

The bill will now go to the full Assembly membership for a vote. Meanwhile, the New York State Senate’s Consumer Protection Committee will consider the bill. New York is one of several states in which ILSR has supported similar grocery price-discrimination bills, including Rhode Island, Minnesota, and elsewhere.