The Amazon / Whole Foods overreaction: Antitrust populism exposed
The gist of these arguments is simple. The Amazon / Whole Foods merger would lead to the exclusion of competitors, with Amazon leveraging its swaths of data and pricing below costs. All of this begs a simple question: have these prophecies come to pass? The problem with antitrust populism is not just that it leads to unfounded predictions regarding the negative effects of a given business practice. It also ignores the significant gains which consumers may reap from these practices. The Amazon / Whole foods offers a case in point.
It’s Not Time To Panic About Amazon’s Purchase of Whole Foods. Yet.
Even with these caveats, it’s still worth looking at the recent trends. Whole Foods’s sales since 2015 have been flat, with only low single-digit growth, according to data from Second Measure. This suggests Whole Foods is not yet getting a lift from the relationship. However, the percentage of Whole Foods’ new customers who are Prime Members increased post-merger, from 34 percent in June 2017 to 41 percent in June 2018. This suggests that Amazon’s platform is delivering customers to Whole Foods.
The Lasting Legacy of the Amazon-Whole Foods Merger Will Likely Be the Spread of Grocery Tech
The negativity that surrounded the deal at its announcement made Whole Foods seem like an innocent player, but it is important to recall that they were hemorrhaging and were looking to exit. Throughout the 2010s, the company lost its market leading edge as others began to offer the same kinds of services and products. Still, the company was able to sell near the top of its value to Amazon because it was able to court so many suitors. Given all of these features, Whole Foods could have been using the exit as a mechanism to appropriate another firm’s rent.
Amazon/Whole Foods: What Me Worry?
Brandeis is back, with today’s neo-Brandeisians reflexively opposing virtually all mergers involving large firms. For them, industry concentration has grown to crisis proportions and breaking up big companies should be the animating goal not just of antitrust policy but of U.S. economic policy generally. The key to understanding the neo-Brandeisian opposition to the Whole Foods/Amazon mergers is that it has nothing to do with consumer welfare, and everything to do with a large firm animus. Sabeel Rahman, a Roosevelt Institute scholar, concedes that big firms give us higher productivity, and hence lower prices, but he dismisses the value of that. He writes, “If consumer prices are our only concern, it is hard to see how Amazon, Comcast, and companies such as Uber need regulation.” And this gets to the key point regarding most of the opposition to the merger: it had nothing to do with concerns about monopolistic effects on economic efficiency or consumer prices. It had everything to do with opposition to big firm for the sole reason that they are big.
Amazon-Whole Foods: The Speculation Then, the Evidence Today
Carl Shapiro, the government’s economics expert opposing the AT&T-Time Warner merger, seems skeptical of much of the antitrust populists’ Amazon rhetoric: "Simply saying that Amazon has grown like a weed, charges very low prices, and has driven many smaller retailers out of business is not sufficient. Where is the consumer harm?" On its face, there was nothing about the Amazon/Whole Foods merger that should have raised any antitrust concerns. While one year is too soon to fully judge the competitive impacts of the Amazon-Whole Foods merger, nevertheless, it appears that much of the populist antitrust movement’s speculation that the merger would destroy competition and competitors and impoverish workers has failed to materialize.
Amazon and Whole Foods, Historically Considered
Viewed from the long history of the evolution of the grocery store, the Amazon-Whole Foods merger made sense as the start of the next stage of that historical process. The combination of increased wealth that is driving the demand for upscale grocery stores, and the corresponding increase in the value of people’s time that is driving the demand for one-stop shopping and various forms of pick-up and delivery, makes clear the potential benefits of this merger. Amazon was already beginning to make a mark in the sale and delivery of the non-perishables and dry goods that upscale groceries tend to have less of. Acquiring Whole Foods gives it a way to expand that into perishables in a very sensible way. We are only beginning to see the synergies that this combination will produce. Its long-term effect on the structure of the grocery business will be significant and highly beneficial for consumers.
Ag-biotech merger symposium wrap-up
On Thursday, March 30, Friday March 31, and Monday April 3, Truth on the Market and the International Center for Law and Economics presented a blog symposium — Agricultural and Biotech Mergers: Implications for Antitrust Law and Economics in Innovative Industries — discussing three proposed agricultural/biotech industry mergers awaiting judgment by antitrust authorities around the globe. These proposed ... Ag-biotech merger symposium wrap-up
Innovation as a shield and a club in the agribusiness mergers
People need to eat. All else equal, the more food that can be produced from an acre of land, the better off they’ll be. Of course, people want to pay as little as possible for their food to boot. At heart, the antitrust analysis of the pending agribusiness mergers requires a simple assessment of their ... Innovation as a shield and a club in the agribusiness mergers
Innovation-driven market structure in the ag-biotech industry
Dynamic versus static competition Ever since David Teece and coauthors began writing about antitrust and innovation in high-tech industries in the 1980s, we’ve understood that traditional, price-based antitrust analysis is not intrinsically well-suited for assessing merger policy in these markets. For high-tech industries, performance, not price, is paramount — which means that innovation is key: ... Innovation-driven market structure in the ag-biotech industry
Antitrust review of ag-biotech mergers: Appropriability versus cannibalization
This symposium offers a good opportunity to look again into the complex relation between concentration and innovation in antitrust policy. Whilst the details of the EC decision in Dow/Dupont remain unknown, the press release suggests that the issue of “incentives to innovate” was central to the review. Contrary to what had leaked in the antitrust ... Antitrust review of ag-biotech mergers: Appropriability versus cannibalization
Effects of gene editing on ag-biotech antitrust
Commenting on Microsoft’s antitrust suit 18 years ago, Milton Friedman said the following: Your industry, the computer industry, moves so much more rapidly than the legal process, that by the time this suit is over, who knows what the shape of the industry will be. Though the legal process seems to be moving quickly in ... Effects of gene editing on ag-biotech antitrust
Mergers, innovation, and agricultural biotechnology: Putting the squeeze on growers and consumers?
Innovation Competition in the Spotlight Innovation is more and more in the spotlight as questions grow about concentration and declining competition in the U.S. economy. These questions come not only from advocates for more vigorous competition enforcement but also, increasingly, from those who adhere to the school of thought that consolidation tends to generate procompetitive ... Mergers, innovation, and agricultural biotechnology: Putting the squeeze on growers and consumers?
