Grocery stores sell generic foods, but they put them on the same shelf as the name brand stuff.

They don't hide the original products in a darkened corner of the back room where no customer can see them. They don't shove their generic into your hand every time you reach for a name brand. Amazon can hide the real products from search, or push it to the bottom of results, while putting their own products at the top of search results even when you search for the brand by name.

there is limited shelf space. they take the original product off the shelf.

I have never once seen a store that removed the major name brands from the shelves and only offered their own generic brand.

You might argue that having generics on the shelves at all means that new small brands have to pay more for placement, but that's not the same thing as stealing product ideas and leaving no other option but the generic version of that thing on the shelves.

Actually, isn't that what Bed Bath and Beyond did? Partly the cause of their failure?

Also what Trader Joe’s does. It’s kinda their whole deal, and partly the cause for their success.

The root cause of their failure was stock buybacks, which was >100% of their debt at the end.

is your claim the shelves were empty where now stand the generic brand? something had to go.

Originally, the generics (which had plain black and white packages) had their own dedicated isles. Now the generics are put on the shelves next to the originals and all those "generic only" shelves got filled with regular products.

I've still never seen a brand new product show up in the store and become popular only to be pulled off the selves and replaced with only a generic version of that product. When I see examples of that happening, I'll accept that grocery stores are guilty of doing what amazon does.

I've seen it in the mini versions of stores in NYC.

Can't speak for your experience, but in mine generics have often replaced name brand products in shelf-space-limited urban locations of stores like Target, etc. I should make it loud and clear that I'm completely fine with this.

I think grocery stores are culpable for a lot of shady behavior.

The least of which is selling end cap space (most walking traffic) to the highest bidder, meaning a lot of junk food and impulsive-purchase products are put in the highest traffic places.

At least on Amazon it's marked as a sponsored result. Even if most people click the first result anyway.

Both Amazon and grocery stores can be in the wrong.

the difference is that grocery stores are easy to search completely - don't like the cereal options on the end-cap? just walk down the cereal aisle and see it all immediately.

Amazon on the other hand, actively makes it difficult to search for other products, by not only promoting their own brands at the top, but filling up the rest of the results with sponsored items.

It's more akin to an endcap with highest bidder items, but then every few feet you walk down the cereal aisle, the shelves separate and move farther away so another endcap can slide into view, pushing the cheaper alternatives farther and farther down the aisle the further you walk.

Not to mention the scale of the problem as well, grocery stores are finite, and amazon nearly infinite, at least in terms of how much time it takes to search through everything.

Grocery stores are not a monopoly.

Pretty close!

Albertsons owns: Acme Markets, Safeway, Haggen, Jewel-Osco, Kings, Pavilions, Plated, Randalls, Shaw's, Tom Thumb, United Supermarkets, and Vons

Kroger owns: Baker's, City Market, Dillons, Food 4 Less, Foods Co., Fred Meyer, Fry's, Gerbes, Harris Teeter, JayC, King Soopers, Kroger, Mariano's, Metro Market, Pay Less, Pick 'n Save, QFC, Ralphs, Ruler Foods, Smith's

And now Albertsons and Kroger are merging together into one gigantic holy-shit mega corp.

> And now Albertsons and Kroger are merging together into one gigantic holy-shit mega corp.

Well, they want to, but its quite likely that the FTC will prevent or force major changes to that.

Not even close. Combining all those brands results in a 13.5% market share.

Groceries aren't a single national market, and its quite likely that such a merger would both create both monopolies and monopsonies.

Its also quite likely that the big grocery merger won't happen as planned for that reason.

Albertsons + Kroger is like 90% of the market in Seattle, where I live, though.

It's very location-dependent. In my midwest metro I believe they'd be less than 5% of the market. I'm sure Albertsons and Kroger each have local monopolies in different regions.

I think they have a good point, though. I would like the laws to prevent a single corporation from being 90% of all groceries for an entire state even if they aren't anything close to a monopoly from a national perspective.

That doesn't seem likely. According to this source, Frey Meyer (18.4%) + Safeway (17.3%) would be the clear market leader with over 35%, but there's still robust competition from Costco, Walmart, and others.

https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2023/04/24/seattle-favor...

Note that Fred Meyer (18.4) and QFC (14.1) are already both owned by Kroger. So that would be 49.8% post-merger, per those figures.

These figures seem to be for the Seattle metro rather than the city itself. Costco might be a competitor in some sense but it doesn't serve the area I live -- the nearest one is a 45 minute drive away. WinCos are even further away -- they serve some of the suburbs, but not the city of Seattle. Ditto Walmart. I've never heard of or seen Campeon. Whole Foods / PCC exist, but are expensive. Trader Joe's is fine but not really a full grocery store.

With the remainder being made up of Trader Joe's and ...

... Amazon

Yeah although TJ's is like 6% of the marketshare of the big two (and Whole Foods / Amazon is ~5%) (see sibling comments).

That seems far from a monopoly. Only 2 of those I have ever been to, and the common places I go: wegmans, costco, aldi, trader joes are all not on there.

Neither is Amazon. Aliexpress, Walmart, Newegg are direct competitors selling cheap crap.

Then there is Target/Home Depot/Lowes/Staples/Costco/Best Buy/etc

Doesn't Amazon prevent you from selling on other stores for a lesser price? I always thought that was a galling scam and couldn't understand why it was even allowed at all.

> Neither is Amazon

The lawsuit that is the subject here details Amazon's durable monopoly power in two markets.

But, yes, if Amazon did not have a monopoly, it could not, obviously, be illegally maintaining a monopoly.

Neither is Amazon in e-commerce, they hold ~39% of the US market and their eCommerce growth lags behind total eCommerce with 9% and 10% respectively. Wal-Mart is at about 6.5% but had nearly 25% growth this year while capturing 36% of all eGrocery sales in the US.

The only place where Amazon is even near 50% is in consumer electronics and office supplies.

The eCommerce market as such has a very long tail and a lot of competitive players just behind Wal-Mart.

> Neither is Amazon in e-commerce, they hold ~39% of the US market and (...)

From the link:

> The complaint alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging.

I obviously read the press release, but haven't read the 173 page complaint yet. But the piece about pricing is DEAD wrong.

The complaint says:

> Amazon uses a set of anti-discounting tactics to prevent rivals from 24 growing by offering lower prices,

But Amazon's contracts with big sellers specifically state that it may only discount when competitors first lower prices, making it in effect a price follower.

It goes on to say:

> Amazon deploys a sophisticated surveillance network of web crawlers that constantly monitor the internet, searching for discounts that might threaten Amazon’s empire. When Amazon detects elsewhere online a product that is cheaper than a seller’s offer for the same product on Amazon, Amazon punishes that seller

Which belies the fact that when you sell on Amazon you agree not to offer lower prices in other places. This is simply Amazon enforce one end of the two way part of the contract. Amazon agrees not to unilaterally slash your prices and you agree not to discount behind their backs. But you aren't as an eCommerce seller obligated to do business with Amazon, they don't have sufficient market share for that.

Furthermore, this statement is specifically false:

> By taming price cutters into price followers, Amazon freezes price competition 11 and deprives American shoppers of lower prices

Amazon is the price follower. If Wal-Mart offers a discount, so will Amazon. If B&H Photo discounts a camera, so will Amazon. The FTC is using sleight of hand here.

I just don't find their arguments here to be very compelling. I'm not against monopoly enforcement, but I just don't see how Amazon actually has the pricing power they're claiming.

I don't know about that. I think the FTC has a bit more insight than a random guy online who admits didn't even read the complaint, and the FCT went through the trouble of putting together a court case to sue Amazon.

I clearly read the relevant pricing piece of the claim, and have direct related work experience. So I actually think I know a lot more about Amazon's pricing behavior than some ghouls deep in the FTC who are following Lina Kahn's marching orders to find a case against Amazon.

I think it's sufficient that I'm able to tear apart the section of the complaint that has bearing on something I have direct knowledge about.

Maybe other sections have merit, but the pricing part does not.

In Denver they are. I imagine other places too. https://kdvr.com/news/local/kroger-albertsons-king-soopers-s...

I do not see the purpose of excluding Walmart from "grocery store" when it sells the most groceries in the nation. Costco and Target are also sell huge amounts of groceries.

Nor is Amazon

The complaint [0] has 32 pages detailing Amazon's durable monopoly power in two relevant markets, so your claim that it lacks a monopoly might do with somewhat more of a counterargument than you've presented.

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...

"Monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service."

Given that there are things such as Walmart.com, eBay, Shopify, and many hundreds of other online commerce stores, they are self-evidently not a monopoly. In fact, they don't even have a majority share of eCommerce in the US.

And they also don't have majority share in cloud services.

Nor do they have a monopoly in eBooks.

I did not say they don't have monopoly power, I said, they are not a monopoly.

(Other than obvious things such as "Amazon products"..., in which case every manufacturer or retailer is a monopoly in their own products.)

> Other than obvious things such as "Amazon products"..., in which case every manufacturer or retailer is a monopoly in their own products.

The way this argument is normally presented is somewhat intentionally obtuse. Obviously Nike has a monopoly on Nike shoes, but "Nike shoes" isn't any kind of sensible market definition because you go to a shoe store and there are a dozen brands of shoes that are all pretty fungible with each other.

But then you get into something like "GM-compatible brake pads" and that is a sensible market definition, because if you have a GM car and you need new brake pads, they need to be compatible with your car. But you'll also notice that this isn't even the same thing as GM-brand brake pads. You could get GM-compatible brake pads from a variety of OEMs that are all compatible with your GM vehicle.

Or, it could be the case that only GM makes GM-compatible brake pads. In which case they would have a monopoly in that market. Not because it's a monopoly on their brand of brake pads, but because it's a monopoly on any brand of brake pads compatible with their brand of cars -- which is something else entirely.

> Or, it could be the case that only GM makes GM-compatible brake pads. In which case they would have a monopoly in that market. Not because it’s a monopoly on their brand of brake pads, but because it’s a monopoly on any brand of brake pads compatible with that brand of cars – which is something else entirely.

> Notice that they don’t even have to be the same company.

As a specific example (and note, that you also don’t have to be the literal sole supplier to have a legal monopoly under US antitrust law), the market Microsoft was found to have monopolized in their big antitrust case was the market for operating systems for IBM-compatible personal computers.

> “Monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.”

That is not the applicable definition for US antitrust law.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Often store-branded articles are in fact produced in the same factory as the original brand products. It's not quite the same.

It's going to come out that Amazon calls the manufacturers for their basics goods, sends them the leading competing item and has them make it with slightly less expensive components to undercut the cost of the competitor.

It's so blatantly obvious if you've ever done a side by side in things like lamps, backpacks etc and other super simple designs.

> It's going to come out that Amazon calls the manufacturers for their basics goods, sends them the leading competing item and has them make it with slightly less expensive components to undercut the cost of the competitor.

They won't need to even call. Most FBA product listing inventory can be received directly from the factory (so Amazon knows exactly where it's made) and they can just go to the factory and offer to do 10x the volume for the exact same item (at a much higher discount).

Walmart has been doing that for decades. And they probably were not the first. It is not a novel strategy.

And Walmart has been repeatedly sued for doing it, just like Amazon is being sued now.

My biggest issue with the way Wal-Mart (and most other retail) did it is that it was... scammy.

Want an HDMI cable? Here's an overpriced Monster cable. Oh, don't want to pay absurdly high prices? Save money by buying one that is only 300% more than it should be instead of 400%!

The nice thing about Amazon was that it broke this model. Suddenly you could buy Anker or (insert small third party here) at very reasonable prices.

Amazon destroying those competitors is doing some damage to this, though.

Grocery stores generally don't have monopoly power to start with, and therefore cannot illegally maintain such power no matter what they do.

They have just as much as Amazon does. Walmart probably has more.

> They have just as much as Amazon does.

What individual grocery firm has a monopoly of the degree that the FTC has identified for Amazon in the two relevant markets for this case over any market, what is that market, and where is the evidence for the claimed monopoly?

Not really feeling like doing a bunch of research right now but walmart has 36% of the grocery market in this country and many local monopolies. I don't think Amazon is above 50% in any ecommerce sectors so seems pretty similar to me. Walmart also is known for the same stuff Amazon does where it bans the companies it buys from from charging less elsewhere.

Not really, or, at least, not at the same scale.

Staples (peanut butter, canned fruit, etc.) tend to have store brands, but grocery stores doesn't have a store brand version of the vast majority of popular products.

At my local supermarket, there is a store-brand option in basically every popular product category.

And I can't even recall visiting a major chain grocery store where this was not the case (at least not in the last 5 years).

And so what if they did? Are manufacturers not allowed to sell to customers directly?

If they did, whether it'd be something of concern would be a function of the grocery stores market size and capture.

If Walmart, for instance, were to start creating Walmart-branded everything after in-store product trials by small companies, that'd be a concern.

Walmart has done that, for decades. They have tons of their own brand in their stores selling for cheaper next to the more brand name items. Equate, Mainstay, etc. In fact, everyone does it. Target, Costco, CVS, Walgreens, etc. It is basic price discrimination / segmentation strategy.

As I said above, staples tend to have store-brand equivalents.

But you don't see Walmart creating store-brand knock-offs of every popular product on their shelves.

> but grocery stores doesn't have a store brand version of the vast majority of popular products

Yes they do. I can shop at safeway and buy nothing buy safeway branch shit easily.