Liz Young of The Wall Street Journal tells her readers how large retailers and wholesalers used their scale to get an edge over smaller competitors. Young writes:
Federal regulators said large grocery chains used their size and scale to keep shelves stocked during the pandemic, edging out smaller rivals when most stores struggled with product shortages and distribution bottlenecks.
The Federal Trade Commission said in a report released Thursday on the impact of Covid-19 supply-chain disruptions that large retailers used their size to pressure suppliers of food and household goods, including putting stricter delivery requirements into place and fining vendors that didn’t comply. The report said the demands led many suppliers to route more goods toward those retailers to avoid the fines. […]
Michael Gay, owner of supermarket Food Fresh in Claxton, Ga., said he pays more per unit for cans of soup from his wholesaler than what consumers pay at a local big-box store.
“And we’re not talking about [that retailer] buying one truckload and we’re buying one pallet. We’re talking about truckload versus truckload,” Gay said.
Read more here.
