Jesus, if sourcing gets consolidated across all of Kroger, it would actually push out smaller producers and if anything goes wrong with the relationship, the producer loses access to Kroger/QFC/Fred-Meyer/Albertsons/Safeway/...

Food is going to get more expensive, lower quality and supplied by less producers.

It's both?

This is America, where muscular middlemen squeeze out the middle class so that capital flows to the top.

Margin for producers? Not gonna happen.

And for consumers? raise prices and lower portion sizes until profits start to decline.

Rent-seeking is the American dream

Providing groceries is not rent seeking. It’s literally selling goods.

People use “rent seeking” to mean “people making money in ways I don’t like”.

And having lived in other countries I benefit greatly as a consumer being able buy things cheaper at places like Walmart.

> Rent-seeking is the American dream

I assume it is everyone’s dream.

If you are 100% self-interested, sure. Most people have a moderate amount of empathy, so it's not their "dream".

It would be interesting to find someone that turns down a $10M trust fund that yields $200k+ passive income.

In either case, there might be some people that would eschew that, but I doubt the population of people that would accept (or dream about it) it is restricted to “Americans”.

What's the probability of such a fund appearing, out of nowhere, for you?

Or what's the probability of creating one in your lifetime, from the bottom? That's what those in debt are thinking, that's what those without a stake in the profits are angry about.

You could instead aspire to provide value for money.

Don’t think it was Marx’s or MLK’s or Malcolm X’s dream (I don’t mean the white washed MLK, etc)

The best way to look at is that it is almost -only- guaranteed to be good for the megazilla corporation that is formed afterward since there is nothing in their corporate policy to benefit anyone other than their own bottom line. Regulators need to nix this deal quickly.

I like how the author of this piece included this early on when they point out the three markets affected by the proposed merger:

- The producers

- The consumers

- The employees

It's easy to picture consumers being squeezed the least by this, but maybe not.

The article called that out.

Plus all of the comments here are discussing the impact of the merger, and not the highway robbery that it identifies as a core problem. Frustrating.