Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices Across the Economy [View all]

[alwaysinasnit]

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart

The Trump FTC tried to hide a complaint showing Pepsi forced shoppers to pay higher prices everywhere but Walmart. But now it's unsealed. And the politics of affordability are explosive.

Last month, the Atlanta Fed came out with a report showing a clear relationship between consolidation in grocery stores and the rate of food inflation. Unsurprisingly, where monopolies prevail, food inflation is 0.46 percentage points higher than where there is more competition. The study showed that from 2006-2020, the cumulative difference amounted to a 9% hike in food prices, and presumably since 2020, that number has gone much higher.

Affordability, in other words, is a market power problem.

And yesterday, we got specifics on just how market power in grocery stores works. The reason is because a nonprofit just forced the government to unseal a complaint lodged by Lina Khan’s FTC against Pepsi for colluding with Walmart to raise food prices across the economy. A Trump official tasked with dealing with affordability tried to hide this complaint, and failed. And now there’s a political and legal storm as a result.

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