In The American Prospect: Pandemic-Era Corporate Bullying

In a new study, the Federal Trade Commission found that big retailers — Walmart, Kroger, Amazon — threatened to punish suppliers unless they got first dibs on food and household goods during the pandemic. Senior Researcher Ron Knox explains it in The American Prospect, and recommends what the agency should do next.

“It’s a big deal when America’s top monopoly cop, the Federal Trade Commission, spends its finite time and resources studying an industry. The agency was created a century ago precisely to figure out which markets were working and which weren’t, but for decades the agency did very little of that kind of inquiry. Under Joe Biden, the FTC’s leadership has rekindled that core function, and last week the agency published the results of its examination of one of the decade’s most vexing problems: the fracturing of the grocery supply chain, and the subsequent and ongoing price hikes seen during and since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The FTC’s supply chain study, two years in the making, was succinct but clear: Documents and data from some of America’s largest grocery retailers, producers, and wholesalers showed that in those first months after the onset of the pandemic, dominant mega-retailers had flexed their muscle as the country’s largest buyers of food, shampoo, toilet paper, and every other consumer good to demand their suppliers fill their shelves first, likely at the expense of smaller stores around the country.”

Read the rest of the article here.

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