Shittier services and higher prices/more fees, every merger ever.
Read a out Wendy’s rolling out new electronic menus this year so they can enact dynamic pricing. Can’t wait until Surge pricing hits another non-negotiable like food.
Burn all these oligarchs down.
Yhgtbsm. Charge people more during a lunch rush because it’s convenient to do so. For fast food. Fuck them.
That’s stripping the “supply” out of “supply and demand” and just making it “demand pricing.”
They demand you pay more.
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.
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
My 2nd closest grocery store is a 40 minute drive, and it’s a Walmart.
FTC is a captured agency with revolving door administration between what businesses they regulate and people responsible for regulation.
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.
Hopefully… Biden appointed some real pussycats to the SEC who also died shit about fuck all…
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.
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
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
Bad news sells. Good news goes unnoticed.
Does anyone get hanged when it reaches half a billion?
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
That and their excessive use of Flo Rida’“Low” in their radio ads.
I wonder how much Walmart paid for that lawsuit.
Didn’t Albertson’s already merge with Safeway?
They did, yes
People are talking about combining the names. If Albertson’s and Safeway didn’t, I suspect it will be the same with Kroger.
Best to keep the names separate to create the illusion of choice.
This has been silently happening in every industry for years.
The Luxottica approach.
Started shopping for sunglasses about a week ago and learned about Luxottica. Turns out there’s a grand total of three brands of sunglasses that are viable for me to buy. Made in the USA but still only cost the same $300 that made in china Oakleys and ray bans cost.
I just ordered a pair of 20 dollar polarized sunglassess off amazon. Fuck the name brands and the ridiculous prices.
Yep! This reminds me of the infographic where almost every major food brand in the world is covered by 10 parent brands. https://www.good.is/Business/food-brands-owners-rp
Safe Albert. Name writes itself. Gives people false sense of security even.
Illusion of choice
Surely this merger is different from all the other ones where corporations lied their asses off then jacked up prices after the merger went through, right?
I’ve got three grocery stores near my house. One is owned by Kroger and two by Albertsons. I hate to think what would happen if there were zero effective competition.
Same situation but we have two Kroger-owned (FM and QFC) and one Albertsons-owned (Safeway). The Safeway is right across the street from Fred Meyer, so the chances are they will shut Safeway down if the merger goes through. No point in competing with themselves. So we’re looking at fewer options, lost jobs, and higher prices. Wheee.
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.
Prices are already outrageous. We don’t need more of that.
Okay we’ll stop the merger. I just need to tell them tomorrow while I’m there to get some tortillas for lunch. Albertsons, …it’s my store! 🎶 🎵
Hope this goes better than when they tried to stop MS from buying up Activision Blizzard.
Block
This
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.
If they won’t let others use it they should be compelled to sell it.
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.
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.
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
It’s interesting living in a partof the USA where I couldn’t even tell you where a Kroger or Albertsons is. Maybe they don’t tend to overlap with Food Lion’s?
Iirc they own many subbrands that cover most of the country. Here is a list:
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.
Yep, that was the conclusion I came to as well.
Stop them building more stores at the very least.
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.
