> 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.