4 ms·

Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers. This is not just in the food industry it

by yndoendo 10mo ago

Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers. This is not just in the food industry it is also in retail such as Amazon. Companies like Kroger are so big they dictate the purchase prices from farms. The farmers were better off in the past with multiple competitors creating a bidding war. Same with consumers, products had to be priced right to win their business. A company I work for had to give free engineering labor in millions of dollars to get access to one of the largest retailers in the USA. Too big not-to-do-business-with harms everyone except the retailer.

autoexec 10mo ago
> Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers. That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. The US just stopped enforcing the law (and also anti-trust laws that would have protected local/small businesses) so here we are. At any point the US could decide that enough is enough and fix the situation but we'd probably have to make it actually illegal for corporations to bribe government officials before it stands a chance of happening.
- eftychis 10mo ago
  It used to be illegal to bribe. Used to... Make a law impossible to enforce, and you suddenly transform the act to a totally legal one, at the expense of people losing trust in the system (specifically the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress). And at some point, the system breaks.
  - gruez 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
      Lobbying involves quid-pro-quo: You pass the bill we wrote for ourselves and we give you a cushy consulting job when you leave Congress.
      - eru 10mo ago
        As Matt Levine points out, the revolving door often works in more interesting ways. If you are a bureaucrat, the way to maximise your next paycheck is often to be especially tough on companies (and on the margin push for more complicated rules that you can be an expert in). Simplified, the logic is "See how tough I am, you better give me a good paycheck to make sure I'm playing on your team." The beauty is: the bureaucrats at the regulator don't even need to consciously think this way. They can be tough out of the ideological and conscientious conviction at the bottom of their heart, and the mechanism that gives them comparatively higher pay afterwards still works. Being tough also raises your profile, when you are but a junior or middling drone. The logic you are describing might work, but only for the most senior appointees who already have a high profile.
        pksebben 10mo ago
        the logic they describe does work. A lot. The Rollback of Dodd-Frank [0]. Recent malpractice reform (in the wrong direction) [1]. Drilling leases [2]. Asbestos. And so on and so on [3]. Tiger's in the house, y'all. And the roof is on fire. And the water is unavailable because it all got sold to nestle [4]. 0 - https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/243973620/when-lobbyists-literally-write-the-bill https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/24397... 1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/in-trump-era-lobbyists-boldly-take-credit-for-writing-a-bill-to-protect-their-industry/2017/07/31/eb299a7c-5c34-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/in-trump-era-lobbyi... 2 - https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/its-common-for-lobbyists-to-write-bills-for-congress-heres-why/ https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/its-common-for-lobbyists-to... 3 - https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/you-elected-them-to-write-new-laws-theyre-letting-corporations-do-it-instead/ https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas... 4 - https://kitoconnell.com/2016/09/27/nestle-spent-11m-lobbying-congress-control-water-cocoa-trade-since-2013/ https://kitoconnell.com/2016/09/27/nestle-spent-11m-lobbying...
- re-thc 10mo ago
  > That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal "Legality" has never stopped big companies from doing these things. Google, Apple, Meta, etc has been receiving fines all day long and they still continue what they do.
  - mlhpdx 10mo ago
    I imagine a world sometimes where punitive measures reflect the scope of crimes. If steal from a person is 1 year, then stealing from 1000 is 10 years and from a million is a lifetime. That’d put the end to political shenanigans, in my imagination.
  - JoeAltmaier 10mo ago
    Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company, fined a thousand bucks for every native rock drawing they destroy? They counted them up, paid the fine, and blasted a road through. All gone. Fines becomes a business calculation. Not a deterrent, not if it matters to the big corporation. Which at some scale, it will become cost-effective.
    - re-thc 10mo ago
      > Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company There's the problem. Australia doesn't scale... not the fines. In Australia, there are a lot of rules, a lot of fines but not much to gain.
      - machomaster 10mo ago
        Is this a specific jab at something? I don't understand you comment, please elaborate.
    - QuantumGood 10mo ago
      A "fine" or "tax" is not necessarly regulation, in that it can be avoided, as in paid for by other actions, or gamed. Regulation should be though of as an input to cause a result in a scenario. Work backwards from the desired result, accounting for gaming the system, to attempt a regulation action. Of course, politicians are motivated only to provide something, not to make it effective.
- coldtea 10mo ago
  >The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. Price collusion is illegal too, but happens all the time. There being a law for it just makes the rare fine a cost of doing business.
  - potatototoo99 10mo ago
    Not if the penalty is severe enough. Mass murder is also illegal and we make sure we don't have repeat offenders.
    - autoexec 10mo ago
      I wish that were true, but mass murderers like Johnson & Johnson, DuPont, Philip Morris, the Sackler family, etc. are allowed to keep on killing people and face no meaningful consequences for the deaths they cause. With enough money you can be a serial killer for decades and get away with it.
      - machomaster 10mo ago
        If money is people (as per the Citizens United vs. FEC decision of 2010), meaning that companies can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections since restrictions "cannot" be imposed on individuals like humans and companies), then surely things like incarceration and the death penalty should also be an option for serious offenders.
  - dismantlethesun 10mo ago
    Corporate punishments can be applied on a fine grain. Every store, every instance, every choice becoming a 10k fine can rapidly make even relatively rare acts untenable as a cost of doing business.
- everdev 10mo ago
  There's too many people here voting against regulation and enforcement, to their own detriment. They have no idea what they're actually doing, they're just run on propaganda from the greedy.
smallmancontrov 10mo ago
But Robert Bork and the Chicago School of Economics and Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party assured me that mergers and trusts were good for me! Look, the companies even have self-serving rationalizations scribbled with crayons on butcher paper saying the same thing! Seriously, though: I cannot believe how high and how far these utterly dogshit arguments flew without pushback and the amount of damage that consolidation has done to the American Experiment. The best time to get a Lina Khan in the FTC was 40 years ago but the second best time was 4 years ago. I just hope the next president picks up the project... though I'm sure the (by then) trillionaires will do everything in their power to stop that from happening.
- _bohm 10mo ago
  Not to mention the number of ordinary people who still parrot the utter dogshit arguments to this day despite being actively harmed by them
- _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
  It's crazy the fan fiction we have allowed to be recon'd into being 'Capitalism' when Capitalist thinkers thought that rent seekers/monopolies were destructive to Capitalist, and that strong government oversight was key part of a strong Capitalist system.
everdev 10mo ago
My choice now is to give every excess penny I have to food or starve to death.
araes 10mo ago
Cigarette companies (no surprise) are known to do a similar type of price fixing, although in their case it's targeting high-income shoppers for lack of discounts. Noticed it a while locally, and national data agrees. If you want to shop for cigarettes, shop in low income, minority areas. [1] Cigarette companies specifically target stores with regular, habitual, high-income smokers for high prices and lack of discounts, while offering significant bargains in stores less than a mile away. [2] [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6689253/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6689253/ [2] https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-industry-marketing/truth-about-tobacco-industry-and-retail-environment https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...

autoexec 10mo ago

> Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers. That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. The US just stopped enforcing the law (and also anti-trust laws that would have protected local/small businesses) so here we are. At any point the US could decide that enough is enough and fix the situation but we'd probably have to make it actually illegal for corporations to bribe government officials before it stands a chance of happening.

eftychis 10mo ago
It used to be illegal to bribe. Used to... Make a law impossible to enforce, and you suddenly transform the act to a totally legal one, at the expense of people losing trust in the system (specifically the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress). And at some point, the system breaks.
- gruez 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
    Lobbying involves quid-pro-quo: You pass the bill we wrote for ourselves and we give you a cushy consulting job when you leave Congress.
    - eru 10mo ago
      As Matt Levine points out, the revolving door often works in more interesting ways. If you are a bureaucrat, the way to maximise your next paycheck is often to be especially tough on companies (and on the margin push for more complicated rules that you can be an expert in). Simplified, the logic is "See how tough I am, you better give me a good paycheck to make sure I'm playing on your team." The beauty is: the bureaucrats at the regulator don't even need to consciously think this way. They can be tough out of the ideological and conscientious conviction at the bottom of their heart, and the mechanism that gives them comparatively higher pay afterwards still works. Being tough also raises your profile, when you are but a junior or middling drone. The logic you are describing might work, but only for the most senior appointees who already have a high profile.
      - pksebben 10mo ago
        the logic they describe does work. A lot. The Rollback of Dodd-Frank [0]. Recent malpractice reform (in the wrong direction) [1]. Drilling leases [2]. Asbestos. And so on and so on [3]. Tiger's in the house, y'all. And the roof is on fire. And the water is unavailable because it all got sold to nestle [4]. 0 - https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/243973620/when-lobbyists-literally-write-the-bill https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/24397... 1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/in-trump-era-lobbyists-boldly-take-credit-for-writing-a-bill-to-protect-their-industry/2017/07/31/eb299a7c-5c34-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/in-trump-era-lobbyi... 2 - https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/its-common-for-lobbyists-to-write-bills-for-congress-heres-why/ https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/its-common-for-lobbyists-to... 3 - https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/you-elected-them-to-write-new-laws-theyre-letting-corporations-do-it-instead/ https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas... 4 - https://kitoconnell.com/2016/09/27/nestle-spent-11m-lobbying-congress-control-water-cocoa-trade-since-2013/ https://kitoconnell.com/2016/09/27/nestle-spent-11m-lobbying...
re-thc 10mo ago
> That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal "Legality" has never stopped big companies from doing these things. Google, Apple, Meta, etc has been receiving fines all day long and they still continue what they do.
- mlhpdx 10mo ago
  I imagine a world sometimes where punitive measures reflect the scope of crimes. If steal from a person is 1 year, then stealing from 1000 is 10 years and from a million is a lifetime. That’d put the end to political shenanigans, in my imagination.
- JoeAltmaier 10mo ago
  Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company, fined a thousand bucks for every native rock drawing they destroy? They counted them up, paid the fine, and blasted a road through. All gone. Fines becomes a business calculation. Not a deterrent, not if it matters to the big corporation. Which at some scale, it will become cost-effective.
  - re-thc 10mo ago
    > Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company There's the problem. Australia doesn't scale... not the fines. In Australia, there are a lot of rules, a lot of fines but not much to gain.
    - machomaster 10mo ago
      Is this a specific jab at something? I don't understand you comment, please elaborate.
  - QuantumGood 10mo ago
    A "fine" or "tax" is not necessarly regulation, in that it can be avoided, as in paid for by other actions, or gamed. Regulation should be though of as an input to cause a result in a scenario. Work backwards from the desired result, accounting for gaming the system, to attempt a regulation action. Of course, politicians are motivated only to provide something, not to make it effective.
coldtea 10mo ago
>The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. Price collusion is illegal too, but happens all the time. There being a law for it just makes the rare fine a cost of doing business.
- potatototoo99 10mo ago
  Not if the penalty is severe enough. Mass murder is also illegal and we make sure we don't have repeat offenders.
  - autoexec 10mo ago
    I wish that were true, but mass murderers like Johnson & Johnson, DuPont, Philip Morris, the Sackler family, etc. are allowed to keep on killing people and face no meaningful consequences for the deaths they cause. With enough money you can be a serial killer for decades and get away with it.
    - machomaster 10mo ago
      If money is people (as per the Citizens United vs. FEC decision of 2010), meaning that companies can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections since restrictions "cannot" be imposed on individuals like humans and companies), then surely things like incarceration and the death penalty should also be an option for serious offenders.
- dismantlethesun 10mo ago
  Corporate punishments can be applied on a fine grain. Every store, every instance, every choice becoming a 10k fine can rapidly make even relatively rare acts untenable as a cost of doing business.
everdev 10mo ago
There's too many people here voting against regulation and enforcement, to their own detriment. They have no idea what they're actually doing, they're just run on propaganda from the greedy.

smallmancontrov 10mo ago

But Robert Bork and the Chicago School of Economics and Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party assured me that mergers and trusts were good for me! Look, the companies even have self-serving rationalizations scribbled with crayons on butcher paper saying the same thing! Seriously, though: I cannot believe how high and how far these utterly dogshit arguments flew without pushback and the amount of damage that consolidation has done to the American Experiment. The best time to get a Lina Khan in the FTC was 40 years ago but the second best time was 4 years ago. I just hope the next president picks up the project... though I'm sure the (by then) trillionaires will do everything in their power to stop that from happening.

_bohm 10mo ago
Not to mention the number of ordinary people who still parrot the utter dogshit arguments to this day despite being actively harmed by them
_DeadFred_ 10mo ago
It's crazy the fan fiction we have allowed to be recon'd into being 'Capitalism' when Capitalist thinkers thought that rent seekers/monopolies were destructive to Capitalist, and that strong government oversight was key part of a strong Capitalist system.

everdev 10mo ago

My choice now is to give every excess penny I have to food or starve to death.

araes 10mo ago

Cigarette companies (no surprise) are known to do a similar type of price fixing, although in their case it's targeting high-income shoppers for lack of discounts. Noticed it a while locally, and national data agrees. If you want to shop for cigarettes, shop in low income, minority areas. [1] Cigarette companies specifically target stores with regular, habitual, high-income smokers for high prices and lack of discounts, while offering significant bargains in stores less than a mile away. [2] [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6689253/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6689253/ [2] https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-industry-marketing/truth-about-tobacco-industry-and-retail-environment https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...