The backdrop to this is a robust debate about the policy and regulatory solutions to help small businesses stay afloat amid rising costs.
Katherine Van Dyck, the founder of KVD Strategies, a consulting firm that advises small businesses on antitrust issues, says price discrimination is at the top of the list of issues that business owners and trade groups raise.
She says it strains not just grocery stores, but also independent bookstores, locally-owned pharmacies and a range of other business sectors.
“When a grocer is faced with those sorts of pricing dynamics in an industry that has razor-thin margins, it makes it incredibly difficult to compete – and it contributes to closures,” Van Dyck says.
As a partial solution, Van Dyck points to a long-dormant law that prohibits sellers from offering preferential prices to certain buyers and not others, in order to protect smaller retailers from the dominance of larger chains.
Dubbed the Robinson-Patman Act, the 1936 Depression-era law was brought back to life at the end of former president Joe Biden’s term having not been enforced for decades.
Biden administration regulators filed two lawsuits under the act – one against a major alcohol distributor and one against PepsiCo. The former is ongoing, while the latter was dismissed, external last year under the Trump administration.
PepsiCo said at the time that it “always and will continue to provide all customers with fair, competitive, and non-discriminatory pricing, discounts and promotional value”.
While come commentators call for the robust enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act, others say this would not benefit consumers, and would instead raise prices for shoppers.
Daniel Francis, a law professor at New York University, says other tactics, like easing the tax and regulatory burden of small retailers, would give them more support.
Francis adds that a situation in which a large retailer asks a supplier to charge its smaller rivals more would be a “huge problem” – but one that is already illegal under separate antitrust laws.
Still, Van Dyck argued there’s no evidence showing harm from Robinson-Patman Act enforcement.
We asked the US Small Business Administration, the government agency responsible for supporting the sector, for a comment.