https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/food-deserts-robinson-patman/680765/
created by LongDukDongle on 01/12/2024 at 22:01 UTC
54 upvotes, 2 top-level comments (showing 2)
Comment by LongDukDongle at 01/12/2024 at 22:04 UTC
27 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Then [The Robinson-Patman Act] was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it.
That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. It soon became notorious for aggressively strong-arming suppliers, a strategy that fueled its rapid expansion. By 2001, it had become the nation’s largest grocery retailer. Kroger, Safeway, and other supermarket chains followed suit. They began with a program of “self-consolidation”—centralizing their purchasing, which had previously been handled by regional divisions, to fully exploit their power as major national buyers. Then, in the 1990s, they embarked on a merger spree. In just two years, Safeway acquired Vons and Dominick’s, while Fred Meyer absorbed Ralphs, Smith’s, and Quality Food Centers, before being swallowed by Kroger. The suspension of the Robinson-Patman Act had created an imperative to scale up.
Comment by americanspirit64 at 02/12/2024 at 14:59 UTC*
20 upvotes, 1 direct replies
As an old guy this article is just a description of the life I've lived and another in the long line of grievances I've had about Ronald Reagan and his huge group of Republican mega-a**holes who took over our country. His economic policies didn't just naturally evolve, they were planned in secret by an Oligarchic cult of business leaders who sadly set out to economically rob and rape Americans. The worst part is they were well aware of what they were doing. They continued to hide their lying ways not just from the baby boomers, but more importantly from the Greatest Generation of Americans, who lived before the Boomers were born, those who build, fought and died for America in the Great Wars of the 20th century, who remember the Great Depression.
I remember times in the late seventies and early eighties trying to talk to people about why Reagan and the Republican economic policies were so bad, and people looking at me and acting as if I came from outer space. Then George Bush and Bill Clinton came along, and they were just as bad, so it wasn't just the Republicans. It is one of the reasons I have been so embarrassed and disappointed by the Democratic Party for the last forty years for abandoning the American working class.
Food is an essential element of life and as such it should have severe guidelines placed on its sale, and healthy restrictions on its use as a profit-making tool for the rich, as it is an essential necessity for life and the healthy success of our country. Artificial food shortages caused by price control are just one such tatic the food industry uses to create a justification for the need to inflate the price of food. There are numerous others, all of them equally as bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business%5C_Plot[1][2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business%5C_Plot
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
The Economic War against America which Reagan began in the eighties, truly began in the early 1930's when business leaders plotted the assassination of FDR who pissed off the Robber Barons during the Great Depression, this war has continued ever since. Especially when you consider George Bush, after Reagan, then George W Bush, were the grandson and great-grandson of Preston Bush one of the leaders of the plot. Oligarch's have been enacting plans to economically over-throw our government since the end of the Civil War and they aren't finished, they are just doing it slowly generation by generation. General Douglas MacArthur who also became President was involved in the plan. You can speak about Conspiracy Theories all you want, however, what you are actually talking about is a lack of understanding in the ways the minds of the rich and the powerful work. Always for their own benefit, not ours.