Stacy Mitchell

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Beacon Press: Big-Box Swindle An expert's in-depth exploration of the enormous impact of mega-retailers-and what communities and independent businesses can do A Book Sense Pick and Annual Highlight

4. As the Walton family — which owns 50% of Walmart stock — cheers its obscene wealth of over $500 billion, remember that all that loot was stolen from small businesses, workers, and you. You are paying for this monopoly in inflated grocery prices, lower wages, food deserts, and dead main streets.

Beacon Press: Big-Box Swindle An expert's in-depth exploration of the enormous impact of mega-retailers-and what communities and independent businesses can do A Book Sense Pick and Annual Highlight

4. As the Walton family — which owns 50% of Walmart stock — cheers its obscene wealth of over $500 billion, remember that all that loot was stolen from small businesses, workers, and you. You are paying for this monopoly in inflated grocery prices, lower wages, food deserts, and dead main streets.

New Details Emerge in Accusation of Pepsi's Predatory Business Practices Favoring Walmart Newly unsealed FTC filing accuses PepsiCo of favoring Walmart while artificially inflating prices for local grocers and consumers.

3. Walmart also exploits the lack of Robinson-Patman enforcement to compel suppliers to raise prices to Walmart's competitors. Newly released FTC docs , for example, show that It conspired with Pepsi to force other grocers to raise their prices above Walmart's, thus preserving Walmart's dominance.

2. .Walmart exploited the shift in antitrust policy in multiple ways. One of the most devastating in small towns was that it sold entire categories of goods at a loss — and then raised prices once local retailers closed. Predatory pricing had been illegal, but a 1993 SCOTUS ruling said it was fine.

Walmart’s Monopolization of Local Grocery Markets | Independent Business In 203 markets, Walmart controls 50% or more of the grocery market. No other corporation has ever amassed this much control over the food system.

1. A reminder: Walmart's $1 trillion valuation is the product of decades of unchecked anticompetitive behavior. It's no coincidence that Walmart began its insane growth spurt after the 1980s decision to stop enforcing key antitrust laws. More than others, Walmart recognized what this meant.

California Poised to Introduce Nation's Strongest Antimonopoly Law With support from ILSR and other allies, California is now one step closer to enacting the strongest antimonopoly law in the country.

Big news out of California. After years of study, the CA Law Revision Commission recommended a major rewrite of state antitrust law — explicitly instructing judges to break with weak federal standards & restore meaningful limits on monopoly power. The legislature often follows the CLRC's guidance.

Small Businesses in Minneapolis Serve a City in Crisis. ‘This Is Our New Normal.’

Great piece in the N Times about how MN small businesses are responding

And this isn't just in times of crisis. It's playing out in less visible ways all the time. It's one of the major benefits of effective antitrust and other policies that disperse economic power.

There's research on this — places with a greater share of their economy in local hands have more "collective efficacy," meaning they can problem-solve much better than places dominated by big corporations.

The difference is particularly evident in times of crisis, when small businesses, run by humans who are part of human communities, respond by harnessing the resources at hand to address the needs around them.

Localized, community-rooted, small-scale economic power matters. For decades, we've pretended like it doesn't — and even used policy to aggressively eradicate it.

Mapping Food Deserts and Grocery Consolidation To help users explore how corporate concentration has reshaped food access across the United States, ILSR created an interactive map that shows food deserts alongside the location of different types…

11. And explore the map here:

Restoring Fair Competition in Grocery Retailing Reviving enforcement of the Robinson-Patman act is a major step towards leveling the playing field for independent grocers and many other small businesses.

10. The Biden FTC made a push to revive enforcement, but the Trump FTC doesn’t seem to care. The good news is that state attorneys general can act — and mare starting to take a close look at this. Learn more and get involved:

9. Reviving enforcement of the law is urgent. Just look at South Dakota. Unable to access fair supplier pricing has left rural grocers like Buche Foods facing an uphill battle to survive — and much of the state at risk of becoming a food desert.

The Great Grocery Squeeze How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert

8. Once local grocers disappear, big chains no longer need to keep stores open in smaller and poorer places. They can count on people to travel to their other locations. Thousands of communities that once had multiple grocery stores now have none at all.

How Corporate Consolidation Broke America’s Grocery System ILSR's brief explains how corporate consolidation fueled the spread of food deserts, and the critical role independent grocers play in building resilient local food systems.

7. Food deserts & inflated prices aren’t accidents. They’re the result of decades of failing to enforce the Robinson-Patman Act, which allowed dominant retailers to use their size to force up wholesale costs for smaller grocers and drive them out. Our explainer lays it out:

6. In Colorado’s mountain towns, grocery choices are slim and dominated by Kroger and Albertsons. When they tried to merge, the trial revealed that Kroger had jacked up prices in "no-comp" towns — places with no competition. The merger was meant to create even more no-comp towns.

5. In Atlanta, as independent grocers disappeared, the big chains bypassed Black and low-income neighborhoods. The dollar chains then inundated these areas — leaving communities overrun with dollar stores and left to subsist on their meager offerings of processed food.

4. In northern Minnesota, independent grocers are often the only thing standing between rural communities and total loss of grocery access. The map shows how fragile these regions are — and how quickly food deserts would spread if local stores close.

3. In southwest Missouri, in the Joplin metro (pop 200,000), nearly every grocery location is a Walmart (or Sam’s). Walmart has 82% of the market. Competing grocers are scarce, food deserts are widespread, and nearly one in five residents lacks nearby access to a grocery store.

2. Created by Katy Milani and Christine Parker, the map is organized by congressional district and is designed to help illuminate the real-world costs of not enforcing antitrust laws like Robiinson-Patman Act. Here are some examples of what you can see when you zoom in:

Mapping Food Deserts and Grocery Consolidation To help users explore how corporate concentration has reshaped food access across the United States, ILSR created an interactive map that shows food deserts alongside the location of different types…

1. We have a new tool for exploring how corporate concentration has hollowed out grocery access in your region: an interactive map that shows food deserts along with the location of every grocery store in the US by type — independent, small chain, large chain, or megachain like Walmart or Kroger.

Prohibit Unauthorized Business Listings on Marketplace Platforms | Independent Business ILSR outlines steps to prevent marketplace platforms like Amazon from listing your small business's products

9. There’s precedent for this approach in how some cities have regulated restaurant delivery apps like DoorDash to stop their predatory practices. You can find Kennedy's proposal here:
ilsr.org/article/inde...

8. My colleague @kennedysmith.bsky.social has a solution — Cities and states should quickly adopt legislation that prohibits tech platforms from listing businesses and their products without written consent.

7. Amazon is also stealing when it gleans data and insights about the independent brands and products shoppers are buying. It can use these insights to inform its own offerings and merchandising.

6. Because the businesses only interact with auto-generated email addresses, they don’t even gain potential customers that they can communicate with. Instead, Amazon is using their products to gain more customers for itself. This is theft.

5. Amazon acts as though it’s doing these businesses a favor. It says that it isn’t even charging a commission! So far, it’s scraped over 500,000 products. Businesses have to go through a time-consuming opt-out process to remove their items.

4. Angie Chua of Bobo Design Studio has been leading the charge to stop this. Check out her videos on what’s happening and the cost in time and money for independent businesses like hers: www.instagram.com/bobodesignst...

3. This is being done without consent and with major harm to small brands: Amazon’s AI will sell products that are no longer in stock, in colors that do not exist, and at prices that are not the actual price. Small businesses are left with unhappy buyers and expensive returns.