(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 521: Why Stores Require You to Drive
February 19, 2025
This week we’re chatting with Stacy Mitchell of the Institute of Local Self Reliance about her recent article in the Atlantic entitled The Great Grocery Squeeze. We chat about the deregulation mood of the 70s and 80s and what that’s meant for shopping, access, and how much we drive.
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Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of this episode:
[00:01:33] Jeff Wood: Stacy Mitchell, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast. [00:01:48] Stacy Mitchell: So nice to be here. Thank you. [00:01:50] Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here. [00:01:51] Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? [00:01:54] Stacy Mitchell: Sure. I’m the co executive director of the Institute for Local Self Reliance. We’re a national organization that helps communities transition from an economy that is oriented towards maximizing corporate efficiency and profits and toward an economy that is. [00:02:10] Optimized for community wellbeing and resilience. And I’ve been here for more than 20 years. I got started as a researcher and built a program here, really looking at the importance of independent locally owned businesses and the problems around corporate consolidation and what it does to communities, what it does to the economy and ultimately our politics. [00:02:32] And from there moved into being the co executive director. [00:02:37] Jeff Wood: What got you into this type of stuff? Initially, what got you into cities in transportation policy and urbanism and things like that? What got you into the subjects that you care about now? [00:02:47] Stacy Mitchell: I grew up in Maine and I live in Maine now in Portland and Portland has, gentrified quite a bit in the last 10 or 15 years. [00:02:54] But growing up here in the 80s, Portland was really a struggling place and Maine in general. Still is a struggling place and lots of parts of the state and my experience of it as a kid and as a teenager was that, we have a very extractive economy that there are these giant entities, whether it’s, timber companies or walmart or some of the big Fishing interests that are consolidating the coast that sort of come in and use the state, use the communities to extract, to take all the timber out and then leave a town bereft. [00:03:31] And a lot of the kind of focus from state policymakers is and sense of the challenges that people felt at the local level was there’s this always this feeling of we’re not in control of our future. And. We’re dependent on these outside entities. And the best we could do is try to offer them tax breaks and subsidies to come in and create some jobs for us. [00:03:52] Even if they’re bad jobs we’ll go begging for those jobs. And that to me just felt so like fundamentally unjust and like this sort of lack of community agency. In a democracy, just, I, really felt that viscerally growing up in a state that really struggled with being on the far margins of the power centers of the U. [00:04:14] S., both the political and economic power centers, and believing in this idea that if you Want to live in a democracy. If you want to have a healthy community and kind of control your own future, that means that you need to have a measure of authority and control at the local level, both over the economy and over the decision making that affects your community. [00:04:32] So I feel like that kind of, I don’t know if I could have articulated it in the same way when I was a teenager, but it was very much part of. Certainly what I felt and observed about the world and I spent a lot of my time, a punk rock teenager who skipped school a lot and spent a lot of time downtown in Portland. [00:04:49] And at that time, half the store fronts were vacant. It had been really gutted by the mall and by big box stores and these like beautiful historic public. Places, squares, walkable places where you had these kind of happenstance interactions, places that were truly like public in the full meaning of that word had been abandoned and degraded in these various ways by an economic system and policy decisions that Didn’t want to support that. [00:05:17] So that was my experience as a teenager. And when I went off to college in Minnesota, I I studied history and I studied labor history the early environmental movement, anti slavery movement. Like I was very much interested in how do you change things? Like how do people come together and overturn something like slavery? [00:05:34] How do people come together and, fight for rights on the job? What does that look like? Cause I wanted to understand how to be able to do that. So that’s what I studied in college. And then, worked a little bit in the labor movement, a little bit testing the waters on what it would be like to be an academic by doing some work at the Minnesota historical society and was dissatisfied with both, being an activist, didn’t have kind of the intellectual piece of the work that I wanted to do. [00:05:56] And the academic side was devoid of any connection really. It wasn’t tangible enough in the real world. And then I got a job at ILSR in my twenties and I’ve been here ever since. And it was a nice marrying of the two. [00:06:09] Jeff Wood: That’s good. That’s good. You connected right away. I feel like the same way when my first job out of school to reconnecting America. [00:06:15] And it’s amazing how, if you get into the right space, you flourish and make those connections. So I wanted to have you on because a lot of the things you just chatted about were evident in the piece that you just wrote for the Atlantic entitled the great grocery squeeze. I’m wondering how you brought in this initial thinking about food deserts, because you’re talking about kind of the desolation of downtowns of main streets and things like that. [00:06:36] But I’m interested in the ideas that came from this piece specifically in that the food desert is something that is a new phenomenon. [00:06:43] Stacy Mitchell: Yeah. Food deserts affect nearly 40 million people. Nearly 40 million Americans live in communities that are both low income and lack a grocery store, and they’re both rural and urban. [00:06:54] And the number of food deserts has actually grown over the last 15 years or so, despite the fact that we’ve had a lot of different efforts to try to alleviate the problem. Conventional explanation for food deserts is that these are communities that don’t really have the wherewithal to support a supermarket. [00:07:13] So they’re either communities that are too poor, they don’t generate enough spending on groceries, or they’re too sparsely populated. And again, there just aren’t enough people to spend enough on groceries. And I got interested in kind of understanding that. Problem more and looking back in time at how it’s evolved. [00:07:31] And as I started doing that research, it’s really interesting. I started looking at academic studies and there really are no studies about food deserts before about the 1990s. There are studies about poor neighborhoods and whether supermarket chains have like bad stores in those neighborhoods or, there are studies about supermarkets in poor places or supermarkets in rural places. [00:07:53] Suggesting that they have supermarkets and I thought that’s odd and interesting that this question of food deserts doesn’t seem to be in the academic literature before about a certain point. And so then I started just digging around and I found these really striking examples. I found this community in a neighborhood in Washington, D. [00:08:11] C. called Deanwood, which is part of Ward 7. It’s a historically black neighborhood, a higher level of poverty, lower incomes. Then the rest of the city, there are no grocery stores in Deanwood, tens of thousands of people live there, no grocery stores. And I found this case study that looked at Deanwood over the decades. [00:08:30] And back in the 1960s, this neighborhood had more than half a dozen grocery stores. There were locally owned grocery stores. There was a part of a co op of 300 stores called district grocery stores that was all across DC. They had a branch of that. They had a Safeway, the national chain. So there were all these grocery stores there in the 1960s. [00:08:49] And there are none today. And then, went digging, looking for a rural study. And I found this study done in North Dakota in the mid 1980s. And virtually every town, more than 90 percent of the towns with at least 300 people in North Dakota in the mid 1980s had a grocery store. And most of these towns had two or three grocery stores on average. [00:09:10] And so You not only had a grocery store in these communities, but you had a choice if you didn’t like one, you could go to another one. And today, more than half of rural North Dakota residents live in a food desert. And it just started to become apparent and I began to piece together more and more of this kind of historical record. [00:09:28] And there is a point in time when we start to have food deserts and it begins in the late eighties, early nineties. And before that they didn’t really exist. And so it raises this question, about the conventional explanation, poverty and ruralness have been with us forever. So they can’t be explanations for food deserts because those arose at a particular point in time. [00:09:49] Jeff Wood: So you went back in time even further and we’re looking for what’s the deal. And I’d never heard of A& P actually, the grocery store. And so apparently this is one of the larger chains back in the thirties. And so there was this big conglomerate grocery store making deals with suppliers and basically trust busters to a certain extent said, no, thanks. [00:10:09] We’re going to fix that. And in the thirties, they passed the act that you talk about in the piece. [00:10:14] Stacy Mitchell: Yeah, that’s right. So if communities didn’t change, then the question is what changed in the industry? And the biggest change that happened in the 1980s in the grocery industry was a decision by the federal government to stop enforcing a law called the Robinson Patman Act. [00:10:30] The Robinson Patman Act, it’s still on the books. It was passed in 1936. It’s an antitrust law, and it was passed in response to a problem that Congress was studying at that time and concerned about, which was that A. M. P. This giant grocery chain back in the twenties and thirties. It is multiplying rapidly. [00:10:52] Small local grocers are disappearing as A. M. P. Gains market share and what Congress found and what a study by the Federal Trade Commission found at the time was that A. M. P. Was going to big suppliers and saying we’re going Huge. We are your biggest customer. You cannot afford to lose us. And you’re going to give us a steep discount and you’re going to charge our competitors down the street, much higher prices. [00:11:20] And we’re going to get all sorts of other favorable terms for you. And in a sense, what AMP was doing was using its size. And it’s leverage over suppliers to drive its smaller competitors out of business and take market share and Congress passed the Robinson Patman Act, which says that you can’t do that. [00:11:38] The Robinson Patman Act makes it illegal for a supplier to discriminate among retailers to give a big, powerful retailer special advantages and better prices and to charge more to smaller retailers. That’s illegal. And it also makes it illegal for big retailers to demand that kind of favoritism. It’s important to note that the law does not prohibit volume discounts. [00:11:59] So if you as a supplier, it’s cheaper for you, you have cost savings. If you supply a truckload of goods versus say a case, you can pass those cost savings along. But the law puts a couple of guardrails around that. It says that you can pass along a discount that’s equal to the cost savings. You actually have to have real cost savings that is reflected in the price. [00:12:20] And you can’t just use that as a backdoor way to give discounts to big chains. And you have to make that discount available to anyone who buys a truckload. So you can’t again, discriminate. The Robinson Padman Act was vigorously enforced by the federal trade commission from the 1930s up until the early 1980s. [00:12:38] And it’s fascinating to go back and look at the grocery industry in those decades. It’s. It’s hard not to really envy what the grocery industry looked like in that time, because we have grocery stores everywhere, lots of grocery stores and lots of choice. You had national chains like Kroger and Safeway that were growing and doing really quite well in those decades. [00:13:01] And you had a lot of independent locally owned grocery stores, even as recently as the early 1980s, Americans spent more than half their grocery dollars at independent, locally owned grocery stores. And the result of all of this kind of dynamism was that there was a lot of choice. There was a lot of competition. [00:13:19] It kept prices low and it ensured that every community really had a grocery store and often several. And when the decision was made in the 1980s to stop enforcing this law, it just triggered this like cascade of huge structural changes in the grocery industry, including massive consolidation and the rise of food deserts and more recently an uptick in grocery prices. [00:13:43] Jeff Wood: I was really interested in the innovation from that too, because you’re talking about sliding, opening doors, like when you go to a grocery store and you pretend like you’re in Star Wars and you’re just like, wave your hands, it’s that’s one of the most fun things ever. But that was one of the innovations that came from the competition that existed. [00:13:57] Stacy Mitchell: Yeah. I think one of the things that’s really clear, looking at this history in the grocery industry, Is that independent retailers play a really particularly important role in their industries and we often overlook this. So this question came to mind as I was doing this research. [00:14:12] It was like okay, so you get rid of this law. You’ve got Walmart. You’ve got other big grocery chains who come in and are like, Hey, we can do what A and P used to do. We’ll go squeeze suppliers. We’ll get discounts for ourselves and we’ll force our suppliers to raise prices on our competitors. And indeed the number of independent grocery stores and regional small local chains just starts to plummet. [00:14:33] It takes a little while to catch up, but it really starts to happen in the nineties and the aughts. And so you’ve got, I mentioned the community of Deanwood, or you’ve got these small towns across North Dakota and you think, okay, the. Local grocery stores are closing because they can’t get fair prices. [00:14:48] Why is it that the chains aren’t just opening? Because you’d think they’d come in and fill all those gaps. But if you think about it, and this is what I found, when the locally owned grocery stores were in the Deanwood neighborhood of DC, If you were Safeway and you wanted to try to capture some of the dollars that Dean Wood residents were spending, you actually had to open a store in the neighborhood because no one’s going to drive across town or take public transit across town to shop in one of your other outlets because they have a great locally owned grocery store already in their community. [00:15:21] And so if you want to compete for those dollars, you actually have to be there when the local stores are gone, then you can actually force residents to have to travel. To your locations outside of their neighborhood. And so that’s really the kind of. Competitive dynamic that the loss of competition and how it really connects to the rise of food deserts as chains realized we can make a lot less investment and we’ll still get those dollars because people will be forced to travel and that the same phenomenon in rural areas. [00:15:49] And so all of that is to say that to kind of circle back to your question about the innovation that came along in these decades when there was a lot of competition, on the chains part, we saw innovation from Kroger and Safeway in terms of distribution, they developed models that created more efficient distribution and the independence looked at that and said we can do that too. [00:16:10] And the way we can do that is we’ll create wholesale cooperatives. So they created like these associated grocer, these big Distribution warehousing cooperatives that the stores owned collectively. So they built collectively together distribution networks that in fact, achieved the same economies of scale that the big chains had. [00:16:29] And then, but the independence, because they were scrappy and local and independent also came up with all of these innovations that totally changed the grocery industry. They were the first to have. What we would think of as a modern supermarket where it’s self service, where you walk around, you choose things off the shelf yourself. [00:16:48] Shopping cart was an invention of an independent grocer. They invented automatic, sliding doors, lots of other things that come out of independence. And indeed this is true across the retail sector. Like the first department store to think about having Santa. Around for you to see before Christmas was an independent department store. [00:17:05] The first pharmacy who’s Hey, we could have a soda counter. That’s an independent pharmacy, so a lot of the innovations in retail come from those independent stores. [00:17:14] Jeff Wood: I want to put a pin in something because you’re talking about making people travel and we’re going to get to that in a second, but I want to go back to the 1980s because one of the things that I thought about when I was reading your piece is another piece that I read it several years ago, talking about the federal motor carrier act, which passed in 1980 and something that Jimmy Carter passed right before Reagan. [00:17:31] Came into office, I think it was in July or something like that before it came in. But that also, you were talking about the Robinson Patman act leading to consolidation and a lot of the bigger companies taking over the motor carrier act did something similar when, which, the federal government used to set the rates at which shippers could, ship goods across the country and they totally deregulated it. [00:17:49] And so it allowed some of these larger companies to basically set up these logistics networks that you were talking about just now. And I find those interesting that a lot of this stuff happened in the eighties and from then on, it seems like a lot of things change. And so there’s a lot of these little tiny tweaks that were made to laws or not enforced in the example of Robinson Patman act that led to these consolidations that actually have left us worst off. [00:18:10] But. I’m interested in that time period and why the Reagan administration would decide that, we’re just not going to enforce this anymore because is it they’re in the tank for just big business? Or is it just because of the deregulation mindset of the time period? What is it about that time period that brought about some of these changes like the Federal Motor Carrier Act, like the Robinson Patton Act, non enforcement, et cetera. [00:18:31] Stacy Mitchell: I think it’s interesting that the deregulation of shipping that you’re referring to really began under Carter. I think the 1970s is actually, a place where we see the roots of this beginning to take hold, within the Democratic Party, there is, this. [00:18:47] Shift in thinking that is happening, it’s partly because there’s a lot of kind of chaos in the economy. There’s high inflation and there’s new global competition in certain kinds of industries, but the Democratic Party, for a variety of reasons, starts to move away from its New Deal roots and begins to embrace this idea that, Bigger is better that big corporations are more efficient. [00:19:12] They are a way to get, have progress. And, we need to actually get in line and kind of encourage that. And then Reagan comes in. And at that point on the right, there had been much, many decades of kind of thinking around this that had been quietly going on in the sides but it gave Reagan this sort of opportunity to really double down and drive that agenda. [00:19:33] And so we see the dismantling of our antitrust laws in the 1980s, the ideology, if you will, that it was done under was this idea of the antitrust laws were created to disperse power. The idea was that like in a democracy, in the same way that you have checks and balances to prevent any one part of government from seizing too much power and, starting to rule in a kind of. [00:19:55] Tyrannical way, there’s a recognition that you also have to have that kind of check and balance on the economy that you can’t allow a power to centralize in a place that could ultimately threaten our freedoms. And, that’s the origin of the antitrust laws. So they were set up really with this idea of dispersing power and this idea that not only was that good for. [00:20:14] Democracy and answer safeguarding the ability of ordinary people to have agency and to control their own destiny. It would be good for consumers. It would be good for the economy. In the 1970s and eighties, you began to see this kind of different way of thinking overtake parts of the democratic party and the Republican party, where the idea is. [00:20:34] Oh, no, that’s not what the antitrust law should be about. They should have a single goal, which is maximizing efficiency. And built into that is this idea that big corporations are naturally more efficient and that is the way to drive progress. And therefore all of these concerns about competition, about dispersing power, none of that matters. [00:20:53] The only thing that matters is maximizing efficiency. And That orientation and antitrust meant that we turned the law actually to favor consolidation of power in a lot of ways, laws like the Robinson Patman act that were on their face really clearly about making sure there was a fair playing field for small businesses. [00:21:11] They didn’t know what to do with those. So they just shelved them. They just said we’re just not going to enforce that. The other antitrust laws they kept enforcing, but in this orientation that actually favored big business. And that same Kind of way of thinking swept through lots of other areas of policy. [00:21:26] We deregulated the banking sector and allowed for a lot of consolidation under Bill Clinton in the 1990s. I think a lot of our transportation policies, certainly the deregulation of shipping and all was driven around that same set of thinking. You can even see it. [00:21:41] Filter down, I think in certain ways and the way that we made land use policy choices at the local level, this orientation really around bigger is better and consolidation and kind of undermining local businesses and local communities [00:21:57] Jeff Wood: that kind of hits me hard this week [00:21:58] Stacy Mitchell: because [00:22:00] Jeff Wood: of what’s happening in D. [00:22:01] C. And we can talk about that in a bit if you want to, but I also see this connection to the entrenchment of the culture of sprawl and we chatted recently about Wes Marshall in his book, Killed by a Traffic Engineer. And one of the things I took away from that book was this idea of exposure and risk. [00:22:21] And when you’re forced to drive more, you create more risk for yourself. You create more opportunities to get into collisions. The thing that the process of all of these deregulation things happening and making people go to these big box stores in different parts of the city, making them travel further to go places, this increases people’s risk. [00:22:39] It increases insurance companies payouts. It increases all of these things. And it connects so well to this largification of vehicles. It connects so well to this growth of these logistics centers and shipping that are happening in cities. And so I’m wondering if you had thought much about that and. [00:22:57] The transportation and land use aspects of what happens when we make these small changes in the 1980s that cascade over decades and end up where we are now. [00:23:08] Stacy Mitchell: Absolutely. And it’s so deeply connected. There is a lot of data that shows that the amount that people drive for shopping and running kind of day to day errands has increased dramatically as Walmart and other big box stores have taken over. [00:23:23] And. I’m really struck looking at it also from the other vantage point, which is that if you create a landscape that’s oriented towards cars, you create a landscape that works very well and very much favors large national retailers at the expense of local businesses. What I mean by that is that. [00:23:44] When you’re flying by on a major roadway at 50 miles an hour at that speed and that sort of relationship that you have to distances, what happens is that in order for you to notice a business that you’re passing by, it generally has to be huge and an often it has to have a national. Name brand, right? [00:24:06] So like a big box store, a big walmart super center works in that kind of an environment. And there’s also data that shows that, when you’re moving in a car, proximity starts to matter less and scale matters more as in people will drive further to get to a bigger store. So you start to favor the scale of the store. [00:24:26] You start to favor national brands. It all works in their direction. And of course, a lot of The financing and development activity that goes alongside that type of land use and transportation system is also geared. It’s these big national companies that are doing the development and the financing and so on, and they favor the chains, throughout that process as well. [00:24:47] So that whole landscape is oriented to favor big business. And meanwhile, the kind of opposite, the kind of mixed use walkable. Areas where you downplay the role of cars. Once you’re moving at the speed of walking, then proximity matters. And so the sort of neighborhood corner store has a lot more value and a different relationship to you. [00:25:10] And when you’re moving at that sort of pace, then you notice things. You’re walking past businesses that you’re noticing on their own. They don’t have to have a national brand to attract your attention. All of this, I think also very much like relates to where we are. In terms of, just the breakdown in our basic civic fabric as a country, and there’s research that shows that if the way you run your errands is by walking around your neighborhood or going into a downtown, you a dense place where there are businesses that are owned by your neighbors, you are far more likely to have a happenstance conversation in that environment. [00:25:46] To run into someone, maybe a neighbor or just to end up, chatting with someone while you’re waiting in line or whatever it may be. And sociologists have this phrase for it. I’m forgetting it now. It’s like a loose social connections or something. It’s not your close ties. [00:26:01] There we go. Week ties, they matter a huge amount. Like these are not your close personal friends, but they are the stuff that like makes our communities operate. And, there’s also evidence kind of connecting all these dots that people who live in places where there are more locally owned businesses and more of that kind of an environment vote more often. [00:26:20] Then people who don’t, they’re more likely to belong to a community organization, a neighborhood organization. They’re more likely to know their neighbors. So all of these things are really, I think, very deeply intertwined and figuring out how we get out of the mess that we’re in, I think, really means we got to look at the granular level of how the places we live work. [00:26:40] Jeff Wood: It also makes me think of like tax policy, right? And this is something that has been talked about for, 2030 years, but, thinking about when a big box store moves in and how much they pay for the parcel of land they’re on versus all of the small businesses, all the sales tax revenue that comes from these smaller businesses versus a large, company who, takes, a cut at how much pricing and things cost. [00:26:59] There’s that too. And also just like we talk all the time in urban spaces is about, how much tax. Rolls are wiped off when you build a new highway and you have to replace it with an interchange. There’s a lot of stuff on social media of people overlaying and highway interchange with the town of Padua in Italy or something like that where it’s just you’re looking at the difference in making money versus spending money and I think that’s an interesting part of this as well and it just ties everything together and that’s why when I read your piece I was just like there’s a lot of like stuff clicking off of my head where I was like There’s so much stuff that’s interconnected and we just don’t talk about it as much as maybe we should [00:27:33] Stacy Mitchell: That’s so right. [00:27:34] The tax thing is, it’s really astonishingly stupid that we, I have a tax system where, yeah, absolutely. It’s like the neighborhood businesses, the downtown businesses are paying a much higher property tax rate per square footage than the big box stores on the outskirts. And we haven’t even talked about Amazon, which is paying nothing. [00:27:53] Even though they are causing all sorts of wear and tear on our streets and our systems, they’re not contributing in the form of property tax for the most part, except the few places where they have warehouses. And of course, warehouses, given their locations are taxed at a much, much lower rate than the kind of neighborhood retail that we’re talking about. [00:28:11] And at the federal level, it’s, even more astonishing. Most recent years, Amazon has paid an effective federal tax rate of zero. Meanwhile, your independent bookstore, your local toy store, local pharmacy, they’re paying an effective tax rate typically of between 20 to 25%. Like in what universe does it make any sense at all to have such a tilted playing field Against businesses that are actually there that are part of your community that are employing people locally that are adding to the life of your street. [00:28:43] It’s just really it’s fundamentally backwards. And when you get into all of this, whether it’s the land use choices, the antitrust choices, the tax policy choices, what you realize is that And what, the argument that we’ve been trying to make here for a long time is that we are losing. [00:29:01] Small businesses and community banks and local farms and all of this kind of local economic life, not because those businesses aren’t effective at what they’re doing. They’re often highly effective. They’re often really great. They often outcompete on basic measures of price and service and so on. And yet they’re being driven out because they’re in an environment in which policy has dramatically tilted the playing field. [00:29:30] Against them. And in favor of their biggest competitors. [00:29:34] Jeff Wood: Have you seen a lot of the items recently about the Inland Empire and the warehousing and the pollution and the displacement and things that are happening there? That brings me to that too, thinking about all the shipping that happens because of one day delivery and those types of things, which, people find them very useful, obviously, because they continue to buy from there. [00:29:52] But I’m interested also in the pollution that happens from the transportation policy of that and the location choices of a lot of these businesses because they go and they go on the outskirts of a region and then they. Ship everything to the interior. And so your point about, taxes and these companies paying so low taxes on warehouses, because that’s generally an industrial uses. [00:30:11] You weren’t going to pay a lot of tax on those. The value is in this high value downtown spaces. It just makes it all, connected to our air quality issues and to a lot of the stuff that’s happening from a climate change perspective. [00:30:23] Stacy Mitchell: Absolutely. Amazon is one of the most, destructive forces, I think, in the economy right now. [00:30:29] They’ve used a number of tactics really to monopolize e commerce and they have, created, a situation where they’re basically a gatekeeper anyone who wants to. Sell their goods to people and connect with customers online has to sell on Amazon. There is no real viable kind of other option. [00:30:46] And with that control, they have been able to reorganize the entire logistics system in a way that has these, I think, quite terrible effects. They’ve driven down wages quite dramatically. People who worked in warehousing used to make More than they do now because of Amazon’s role, they’re much higher levels of injuries now in logistics and in warehousing because of Amazon, really devastating. [00:31:11] And then they’ve concentrated those shipping operations in places like the Inland Empire, the ports around New Jersey and New York, or there’s certain locations, those communities not incidentally are, predominantly black and brown places, and they suffer from really high levels of air pollution. [00:31:28] And, with the attendant kind of health effects, and this is not I think it’s important to say that, it’s not that there isn’t a place for ordering online and having stuff delivered. Like I think there’s a real convenience to being able to connect with businesses that way, but we have a monopoly gatekeeper and we assume because Amazon has been the only game in town, that’s the only way that this can work, but that’s totally not true. [00:31:52] And if we. Broke Amazon broke up Amazon’s monopoly, which, there’s a federal lawsuit that’s trying to do right now that we’re heavily supportive of, we could really reimagine what e commerce looked like we could imagine a scenario in which local businesses were able to connect with their customers online. [00:32:10] And we had localized delivery systems. Some of those could be by Bike messengers, some of those could be by, different means that were more sustainable. They’re just a whole other way that we could organize this than the way Amazon has, Amazon wants us to believe that the trade off is we don’t get to shop online unless we accept. [00:32:30] Horrible jobs, air pollution, all the other things controlled by this one company. And that I think is just complete bullshit, frankly. And I’m glad to see them being challenged with a monopolization lawsuit. And I think it creates a real opening if we do break them up to imagine a different kind of e commerce landscape that would be better for all of us. [00:32:50] Jeff Wood: In addition to that solution, what are some of the other solutions? We’ve tried, we’ve tried subsidies and tax breaks for small grocers. We’ve tried all these things, but it never seems to quite work. I think because of just the basic problems that you’re talking about, which is like the, monopolization of the shipping and suppliers and those types of things, but what is it that we should do in order to fix some of those things that are the problem [00:33:10] Stacy Mitchell: I think that the really good news on this front is after a lot of years, decades in which we ignored the problem of monopoly and in which we ignored our antitrust laws, we have seen this resurgence in. [00:33:25] Support for bringing back antitrust and for reorienting those laws back to their original purpose. So this effort really started around 2016 2017. there started to be more lawmakers and others who are speaking out about this. There was more academic research that showed. Concretely the consequences of the consolidation that we’ve seen in many industries, just more and more people for various reasons, including, I think chief among them sort of the reality of looking around at food deserts and pharmacy deserts and wages going down and the power of big companies in our politics. [00:34:00] A lot of people at that point were looking around going, there is something more deeply wrong. And there is this rediscovery of Oh wait, we actually have a set of laws. On the books that are designed to deal with exactly this problem. We just have not been enforcing them including the Robinson Patman act. [00:34:17] And so that thinking really took hold under the Biden administration. And he appointed some very aggressive trust busters who. Worked very hard over those four years to bring these laws back. That is why we have a monopolization case against Amazon, Google, other companies. That’s why we’ve blocked a lot of big mergers, including the Kroger Albertsons merger, which would have had a really devastating effect, particularly in the West and caused a lot of new food deserts, as well as given that combined company, the ability to raise grocery prices even higher than they already are. [00:34:48] But that merger was blocked. And just in the last couple of months, we’ve had the. First two Robinson Patman act cases in decades. So there was probably the most important of the two is a case filed against Pepsi. Pepsi doesn’t just do a soda. They also own a lot of different supermarket brands. [00:35:05] They’re a huge grocery supplier. And this lawsuit particularly implicates Walmart’s business model. It basically alleges that Pepsi has been favoring Walmart, in ways that have not only helped Pepsi, but enabled Walmart really to dominate the grocery industry and to drive out. Local grocers. So that’s an exciting case to see. [00:35:24] We’ve obviously had a change in administration and there is some degree of bipartisan support for this issue, partly because rural communities are suffering some of the worst effects of corporate consolidation. I don’t think that support is as visionary or is aggressive as what we’ve seen from Democrats. [00:35:44] So we’ll see. But, the incoming members of the Federal Trade Commission, include Republicans who have voiced support for Robinson Patman. And so I think and hope that we’re likely to see. These cases continue, and it’s really putting companies on notice that, hey, there is this law and it matters. [00:35:59] We do need more investigations, more cases, but I am cautiously optimistic on the federal front. But then the other really important thing to note about antitrust in particular is that this is entirely a state matter, too. So states not only have the full power to enforce the federal antitrust laws, like your AG can enforce federal antitrust laws. [00:36:19] But also states have their own antitrust laws, some of the which are different and stronger than the federal ones. And so just in the course of these last few years, we have also seen state attorneys general and even state lawmakers going, Hey, wait a second, there’s a set of tools we can use to take this on. [00:36:35] My organization had an event in January where we invited some of the leading state attorneys general to speak and some of the folks working on this at the local at the state level and in different places. And it was a really exciting event just to hear about all of the different ways in which states are in fact taking on whether it’s collusion among landlords to raise rents or whether it’s supermarket mergers. [00:36:58] There’s a lot going on in this front. So I feel pretty hopeful about that. And I can feel This sort of realization that concentrated corporate power lies at the root of so many of our other problems. And that if we can address that, it makes it a lot easier to do all the other things that we’re trying to do and to fix. [00:37:17] I think that’s Taken on a kind of new life, and I think it’s pretty durable, and I’m hopeful that it’s gonna continue to grow [00:37:27] Jeff Wood: looking at who was sitting on the stage during the non creation. There’s a lot of folks that, seem to enjoy the oligarchy life, and, are the heads of these organizations that are controlling of commerce and transportation and communications. [00:37:43] And aside from the positives that you brought up just now, I’m just scared about what’s going to happen now that, the oligarchy and the possibility of worse outcomes is now at our doorstep. [00:37:54] Stacy Mitchell: I think we’re in a very treacherous place when you see, the big tech companies kissing Trump’s ring and this sort of marriage of. [00:38:03] Corporate power and the sort of authoritarian oriented leader, that is a very dangerous combination. There’s a lot of examples both through history and across the world about how that can go. And so I think that’s quite scary and it’s, it is the place where you end up if you do not. [00:38:22] Check the power of large corporations. They play a key role in driving the inequality, the sense that democracy doesn’t work for people. Why is it that there’s this sort of hunger for a strong man? There are many reasons behind that. I don’t want to be ADHD. I’m You know, boiled them all down to one, but one of it is a feeling that is long existed that people feel like, yeah, that this is a government that works for the powerful and I don’t have any control over it. [00:38:47] So why do I, why should I believe in democratic institutions? They don’t actually work for me. That’s real. And so there’s a way in which the chickens have come home to roost on this problem from our failures for not dealing with it for a long time. But I think it’s very treacherous. And makes it all the more important that we pursue this work that’s going on at the local and state level to take this on, I am hopeful that the federal trade commission will retain its independence. [00:39:14] It is an independent agency. It is not supposed to be directly under the control of the president. It has a lot of tools to address this problem that it will continue to do that, but we’re all going to have to see it’s, but it’s certainly turbulent times ahead. [00:39:27] Jeff Wood: Yeah, I did appreciate your comment about connecting the separation of powers and the democracy of our government and also just of business as well, because I feel like that’s seems very true in that over a long period of time, we’ve let that go. [00:39:39] And a lot of people do feel a little bit helpless about what they can do. It’s I think I saw somewhere where you said, a lot of people, the only thing they think they can do is end their Amazon prime membership. And apparently there’s much more we can do, which you’ve brought to light today, which I really appreciate. [00:39:53] Thank you for joining us, Stacey. Where can folks find you if you wish to be found? [00:39:58] Stacy Mitchell: I do wish to be found. So it’s the Institute for Local Self Reliance, ILSR. And we’re online at ILSR. org. Obviously you can find us through a search. We’ve got lots of tools, lots of resources for people to engage locally, as well as to get involved in some of these state and federal actions. [00:40:15] So if you want to, if you want to stop Dollar General coming into your town, we can help you do that. And we can give you some guidance on how to advocate with your state attorney general and lawmakers around antitrust, along with a whole bunch of other issues that we haven’t talked about today. [00:40:29] I’m also on blue sky and on Twitter, we have newsletters. If you go to our website and click, I think it’s get connected as the menu item, love to have you sign up for our newsletters. And I also wrote a book that I’ll mention because in some ways, this conversation is more relevant to the book than any. [00:40:46] Other recent conversation I’ve had, I wrote a book in 2006, it’s a bit dated called big box swindle about the rise of big retailers. And although it’s dated, a lot of these concepts are very much relevant today. So the stuff that we talked about in terms of the relationship of the built environment and corporate concentration and community life and all of those kind of intricate interconnections, there’s a section of the book that looks at that. [00:41:10] So also invite people who want to dig deep to take a look at that. [00:41:14] Jeff Wood: Nice. Stacey, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. [00:41:17] Stacy Mitchell: Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
