Washington Monthly - Everyday High Prices
Policy Director Phillip Longman puts out a publication on how discounting led to inflation, shortages, and inequality.
For years, the only supermarket serving the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwest South Dakota was run-down and a threat to public health. Inspectors from the Indian Health Service repeatedly cited its distant corporate owners for food safety violations, such as mixing rotten hamburger with fresh meat and repackaging it for sale. So leaders of the Oglala Sioux Tribe were thrilled when, in 2018, they persuaded an experienced grocer to buy the store and commit to running it right.
R. F. Buche, whose family business has operated independent groceries throughout South Dakota for four generations, started with months of demolition and extensive remodeling. Today, except for the signs written in Lakota, the store looks just like any supermarket you might find in any middle-class neighborhood. Floors are clean, and shelves generally well stocked, including with an abundance of fruits and vegetables that were never available before. This is particularly important in a community where poverty is so extreme that most people don’t own cars and the next-nearest grocery store is nearly 40 miles away.
But two big problems remain. The first is affordability. To stock his store, Buche has to pay wholesale prices that are often nearly double what Walmart pays and must pass on much of that cost to his customers. The second is that when national shortages of critical items like baby formula emerge, Buche and the Ogala Sioux are often the hardest hit, either having to do without or enduring longer waits for critical supplies than people elsewhere.
Yet while these problems may be extreme on the Pine Ridge reservation and in other very poor places, Americans everywhere are also harmed in serious ways by the zombie policy idea that has created these inequities. It’s a notion that’s supposed to bring everyday low prices for everyone. But in practice it has proved to have the opposite effect, creating more markets in which those with the least power pay the most, while those with the most pay the least.
Economists use a $20 word to describe the kind of market in which this occurs. They say it’s a monopsony. Monopsony is like monopoly but it’s when big buyers, not big sellers, dominate a market. When many sellers compete for the business of just a few big buyers, that gives the big buyers the power to coerce the sellers into giving them discounts and other concessions none of their smaller competitors can get.
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