Why? Unless there was some kind of payola, this is doesn't make sense.

I hate to say it, but was he proven wrong? People are still buying junk food and soda (their primary products) despite prices going up. Looking at Pepsis profit margin, it seems to have hovered between 9.5% and 10.5% since 2021.

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.

First, that made me raise an eyebrow.

> ...and failed.

Then, that made me laugh.

> And now there’s a political and legal storm as a result.

Finally, that made me sigh, because nothing's gonna happen. The "storm" will pass, as it always does.

I'm a habitual enough soda drinker that I'm a six-pack-a-day diet soda drinker (don't judge me, at least it's not Red Bull). I notice that there's vendor collusion at Walmart for months at a time where the Pepsi six-packs will typically go on sale for a few months at a sub-$4 to $5 price (currently it's $4.98) while Coke packs will be $5-6 off sale.

Cycle three to four months and Coke will enter the $4 position and Pepsi goes back up to a full retail price for the next quarter.

I've always seen the 'cycle' of the two competitors constantly hitting a 'sale' price across various retailers.

If it were to be enforced uniformly and aggressively it would be devastating: Every negotiation between a supplier and a purchaser at every level is potentially a federal crime!

If it were to be enforced capriciously, it would put unchecked power over everyday commerce—again at every level—into the hands of the FTC and its political masters.

No thanks. Repeal it so we can stop hearing about this “one neat trick to roll back neoliberalism!”

Our country and civilization is slowly turning into organized crime.

I was young and dumb enough then not to know that, for example, 7-Up and Sprite were not independent soft-drinks. I assumed every flavor of soda was its own company. I soon started to notice the drink pattern based on whether they had Coke or Pepsi. Those two owned all the other flavors—and they each had their own variant of the other's.

I was told too by management that we only bought Pepsi drinks. Again, native me thought, "Why not have both Coke and Pepsi and let the customer decide?" I am not sure whether there was a pricing issue that prevented management from buying both—like the loss of a discount for going Coke-only or whatever.

Of course you always saw signage, etc. around the restaurant with Pepsi logos (or Coca-Cola logos at other restaurants) so you knew there were gifts in other forms that one of the two would entice the owner with.

What a slow growing up I have gone through since then. It seems like the kind of thing they ought to teach in primary education.

Capitalism in practice: a relative handful of rich people cooperating with each other to extract as much money as possible from the middle and lower classes.

You can see which version of capitalism this document supports.

The "fiscally conservative" aspect of the Republican party (and the Democratic party to a lesser degree) don't want people to think of capitalism-in-practice; they want happy consumers who think that competition is still a thing. Since this document clearly goes against that narrative, it must be suppressed.

And even if people buy a lot of junk food, they might have bought competitors’ junk food. Laws are still laws even if you don’t like the people the laws protect.

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.

https://waldenconsultants.com/2020/04/13/yet-another-study-s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

But, beyond that, while logically voters should vote against politicians that favor businesses over them, they often appear to do the opposite. They simply gain the label of "business friendly".

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.

Sadly for this RedBull drinker, they never go on sale, at all, ever, anywhere.

Even weirder, the drinks that I flavor myself taste way better than the ones in the store. I suspect they have been titrating their flavoring down over time. Root Beer I make myself using drink powder tastes way better than the ones from the store. Same for grape and orange sodas.

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/

[2] https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...