There are several issues at play. Price fixing is one of them but one that is very near term. The cost to end consumers is another, and they are separate thoug

There are several issues at play. Price fixing is one of them but one that is very near term. The cost to end consumers is another, and they are separate though related. What's concerning but more along the horizon (a few years out), is the price and cost of food in general, and the concentration of all business as a whole (of which people see the most negative affects on the surface where price fixing like this occurs). What people don't see is what led to that concentration in the first place, it had to have a bias to get to where it is at now, that bias is a combination of regulatory and competitive advantage. Few think through more than a few steps ahead though to understand what that means and where its going. Wages aren't going up, inflation drives everything forward (because we can't stop printing), and the bias towards concentration seems to be coming from the fact that corporations are allowed to have leverage ratios greater than one, or in other words they have received preferential loans and as a result are able to out-compete regular business. These companies are zombie companies, and the profits are acting as a sieve. The loans came from the FED/Primary Dealers (who run the FED), so in classic definition these would be called state-controlled apparatus since they are dependent on the loans for continued production and the loan to production value ratio is for the most part negative (showing absence of a market). When all non-state-controlled producers leave the market, the market no longer exists, and you have non-market socialism; which we know fails... every time. This happens when the store of value is no more, and currency is no longer considered a medium of exchange. Who decides this? The minority party that has something others need. You generally need supply before you can have demand. This is very concerning, since ponzi's fail in the third stage where outflows exceed inflows, and we are coming up on that point (within 5 years) in terms of debt growth to GDP. Producers decide by stopping production, being bought out and shutting down. In the near term, we are looking at a wholesale conversion of almost every economy that is tied to the dollar to the same structure as non-market socialism. It fails generally starting with shortage, then sustaining as a result of 6 intractable problems. One being the mathematically chaotic economic calculation problem. New currencies can't be adopted because there is no trust or credibility in the institutions that led the way to disaster and prevented course correction. This can be seen with China and the other BRICS nations where commodity prices (buffeted by options structured contracts and leverage), distort price. Interesting times ahead.