Politicians Will Burn Down Anything That Is Good Just To Get Their Name In The News
a group of 12 Democratic Congressman have signed a letter urging the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to conduct a more in-depth review of e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc.'s plan to buy grocer Whole Foods Market Inc., according to Reuters.
Rumblings that Amazon is engaging in monopolistic business practices resurfaced last week when the top Democrat on the House antitrust subcommittee, David Civilline, voiced concerns about Amazon's $13.7 billion plan to buy Whole Foods Market and urged the House Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing to examine the deal's potential impact on consumers.
Making matters worse for the retailer, Reuters reported earlier this week that the FTC is investigating the company for allegedly misleading customers about its pricing discounts, citing a source close to the probe.
The letter is at least third troubling sign that lawmakers are turning against Amazon, even as President Donald Trump has promised to roll back regulations, presumably making it easier for megamergers like the AMZN-WFM tieup to proceed.
It is difficult even to communicate how much Amazon has improved my life. I despise going to stores, and Amazon allows me the pick of the world's consumer products delivered to my home for free in 2 days. I love it. So of course, politicians now want to burn it down.
I say this because the anti-trust concerns over the Whole Foods merger have absolutely got to be a misdirection. Whole Foods has a 1.7% share in groceries and Amazon a 0.8%. Combined they would be the... 7th largest grocery retailer and barely 1/7 the size of market leader Wal-Mart, hardly an anti-trust issue. So I can only guess that this anti-trust "concern" is merely a pretext for getting a little bit of press for attacking something that has been successful.
The actual letter is sort of hilarious, in it they say in part:
in the letter, the group of Democratic lawmakers – which includes rumored presidential hopeful Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey – worried that the merger could negatively impact low-income communities. By putting other grocers out of business, the Amazon-backed WFM could worsen the problem of “food deserts,” areas where residents may have limited access to fresh groceries. "While we do not oppose the merger at this time, we are concerned about what this merger could mean for African-American communities across the country already suffering from a lack of affordable healthy food choices from grocers," the letter said on Thursday.
Umm, the Amazon model is being freed from individual geographic locations so that everyone can be served regardless of where they live. This strikes me as the opposite of "making food deserts worse." It is possible that Amazon might not deliver everywhere at first, and is more likely to deliver to 90210 than to Compton in the first round of rollouts. But either they do deliver to a poor neighborhood, and improve choices, or they don't, and thus have a null effect. And it is really sort of hilarious worrying that new ownership of Whole Foods, of all groceries, is going to somehow devastate poor neighborhoods.
By the way, if I were an Amazon shareholder, I would be tempted to challenge Bezos on his ownership of the Washington Post. In a free society, he is welcome to own such a business and have that paper take whatever editorial stands he wishes. However, we do not live in a fully free society. As shown in this story, politicians like to draw attention to themselves by using legislation and regulation to gut successful companies, particularly ones that tick them off personally. In this case:
So far, it’s mostly Democrats who are urging the FTC to take “a closer look” at the deal. However, some suspect that Amazon founder Jeff Bezo’s ownership of the Washington Post – a media outlet that has published dozens of embarrassing stories insinuating that Trump and his compatriots colluded with Russia to help defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton – could hurt the company’s chances of successfully completing the merger, as its owner has earned the enmity of president Trump. Similar concerns have dogged CNN-owner Time Warner’s pending merger with telecoms giant AT&T.
