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.
Well, they want to, but its quite likely that the FTC will prevent or force major changes to that.
Its also quite likely that the big grocery merger won't happen as planned for that reason.
https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2023/04/24/seattle-favor...
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.
... Amazon
Then there is Target/Home Depot/Lowes/Staples/Costco/Best Buy/etc
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...
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.)
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.
> 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.
That is not the applicable definition for US antitrust law.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...