Stacy Mitchell

Mayor Harrell Proposes Legislation Banning Anti-Competitive Covenants that Block New Grocery Stores and Pharmacies  - Office of the Mayor Legislation aims to address food insecurity and reduce barriers to acquiring needed medications Seattle—Today, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the submission of legislation to the Seattle City Council…

Kroger is closing a Fred Meyer in Seattle, creating a new food desert. Great to see the city moving to ban covenants, which Kroger has used to block competitors from opening on its old sites. State lawmakers should follow by mandating suppliers give local grocers fair pricing.

Supermarket Shaping Critics say Zohran Mamdani’s public grocery store proposal will never work. But Mamdani’s idea isn’t the problem—market consolidation is.

Municipal grocery stores work when cities own the building and lease it to a nimble local operator. But they could be transformative if cities also used their authority to secure fair supplier pricing for independent grocers. Great piece from @TheProspect.

Rich People Feel Pretty Good Right Now Breaking down consumer sentiment by income.

www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Rich people feel pretty good right now. But those making less than $100k and especially those under $50k have nosedived since January. Chart by @tracyalloway.bsky.social

USDA Cancels ‘One of a Kind’ Report on Food Insecurity Anti-hunger experts say ending the Household Food Security Report will make it difficult to track the impact of tariffs and cuts to food assistance.

USDA will stop publishing a report on food insecurity that anti-hunger groups say is key to assessing hunger nationwide, making it "difficult to track the impact of tariffs and cuts to food assistance."

The Absurdity of Highway Spending as Economic Development | Strong Towns With MnDOT's buttonhook design, “supporting business” is the sales pitch, but corporate subsidy is the product.

A $58M traffic project being billed as economic development is essentially “...prop[ping] up $40.8 million of gas stations, strip malls, and big-box stores," says @clmarohn. "If we’re serious about commerce, let’s invest where the returns are real.”

About Half of Adults with ACA Marketplace Coverage are Small Business Owners, Employees, or Self-Employed | KFF This analysis estimates that 48% of adults under age 65 with individual market coverage are either employed by a small business with fewer than 25 workers, self-employed entrepreneurs, or small…

Republicans in Congress are dealing big blows to small businesses right now. One looming one is the dramatic increase in health insurance costs for those who buy through the ACA marketplaces. Half— half! — of people under 65 using the marketplaces are small business owners and employees.

Fewer households, businesses will get high-speed internet under revamped federal plan • Maine Morning Star Tens of thousands of homes and businesses without internet access will not receive it.

2. Not having high-speed internet is a huge obstacle to carrying out basic tasks, like applying for a job. But it's more than that; as my colleague @sportshotchris.bsky.social points out, this is about equality and freedom. mainemorningstar.com/2025/09/22/r...

1. The Trump Administration has disqualified thousands of rural communities from receiving expected funding to build broadband networks. "There’s going to be a lot of frustration with these changes and the way it walked back from what was going to be a very promising outcome.”

Under Biden, dominant corporations used supply chain issues as a cover story to increase profits, driving inflation. Now tariffs seem to be providing the new cover story as wholesale prices soar. Of course, the underlying problem is insufficient competition in too many markets.

Boeing, Redwood & Mercedes-Benz have received $1.5 billion in subsidies to build in South Carolina—and they're not even meeting their job targets.

What if those dollars went to local businesses instead? Nice op-ed by Charleston resident Brady Quirk-Garvan: www.postandcourier.com/opinion/comm...

The head of antitrust at DOJ, Gail Slater, may be serious about enforcement, but monopolists like Real Page, Live Nation, and AmEx are just going over her head and lobbying Bondi and Trump to sidestep the law. www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

With monopoly electric utilities price-gouging & blocking renewables, there's growing interest in converting them to publicly owned utilities. ILSR has a new guide for how to do that. Check out the Handbook for Public Power Campaigns. ilsr.org/articles/pub...

Last night, my hometown of Portland, Maine stood up to Live Nation. Amid strong grassroots opposition, the city council voted 6-3 for a moratorium — a key step in stopping this monopolist from building a large venue and taking control of live music in our city. www.pressherald.com/2025/08/11/p...

14. You can find the motion and a supporting memo of law are here:
ilsr.org/articles/ils...

13. When the judge told PepsiCo to justify the redactions earlier this year, he noted that there is a “presumption in favor of public access to judicial documents.” We agree and hope our motion succeeds.

12. As we note in our motion, the public has a deep interest in seeing the details of the complaint and getting a clear view of the FTC’s allegations and supporting evidence that PepsiCo and Walmart collaborated to dominate groceries.

11. That’s because lack of Robinson-Patman enforcement is killing both rural and urban communities. In the 1980s, virtually every small town in North Dakota had a grocery store. Today half of rural ND is a food desert.

Among voters, this is a strongly bipartisan issue.

10. When Walmart found out about the FTC’s investigation last year, it launched an aggressive lobbying campaign in Congress, trying to get members to pressure the FTC to back off. But Walmart found little support.

9. And that’s not the only consequence. The lack of competition means that big players like Pepsi and Walmart can jack up grocery prices without losing customers.

The Policy Shift That Decimated Local Grocery Stores

8. Since enforcement of Robinson-Patman stopped in the 1980s, we’ve lost thousands of local grocers. From the 1930s to the 1980s, independent grocers held more than half the grocery market. Now it’s about 25%. Food deserts have exploded.
ilsr.org/articles/pol...

7. Reviving the Robinson-Patman Act is crucial to revitalizing local economies and lowering prices. If competing independent retailers, buying in high volume via their wholesalers, are denied access to the same prices as Walmart & Dollar General, they will continue to disappear.

6. Chairman Ferguson, who took over the FTC this spring, called the complaint “weak.” Former Chair Lina Khan called Pepsi’s conduct a “patently illegal scheme.” That gulf demands sunlight. People should be able to judge for themselves.

5. But before Pepsi’s deadline, the FTC (now under Andrew Ferguson) dropped the case. Thus the public is in the dark. We can’t see the scheme the FTC alleged, which retailer benefitted, which competitors were harmed, or the impact on grocery prices and communities.

4. That didn’t happen here. When the FTC (under Lina Khan) filed the case in January, it said it would “swiftly seek to lift the redactions.” The judge ordered Pepsi to justify whether any of the blacked out material should remain hidden.

3. In antitrust cases, complaints are often temporarily sealed. But courts generally move quickly to remove the redactions, so the public can see the evidence and understand what’s at stake.

2. Most of the complaint is heavily redacted, including the name of the favored retailer (reportedly Walmart). The complaint alleges that Pepsi gave a big-box retailer illegal price breaks — while raising prices to competing independent grocers and their customers.

1. Today, ILSR filed a motion in federal court to unseal the FTC’s antitrust complaint against PepsiCo. The case bears directly on high grocery prices and food deserts — and would've marked a crucial revival of the long-neglected Robinson-Patman Act. But the public may never get to see it.

For Prime Day: My thoughts on the need to break up with Amazon and BREAK UP Amazon. mailchi.mp/smallbusines...

Big thanks to @jaysondeleon.bsky.social and @99pi.org for pursuing this story.

It features interviews with me, Jeanne Michon of New Beginnings, which is working to feed people in Woonsocket, R.I., and former FTC Chair Lina Khan.