Business Law Answer

[Livia Dossantos]

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As a reader, I link these two findings. Big chains sort across a huge and diverse pool of retail workers to identify and promote effective front-line managers. This generates higher-quality management than when Mom & Pop put Cousin Jimmy in charge, which makes the stores more productive and raises pay.

The goal of antitrust policy is to protect and promote a vigorous competitive process. Effective rivalry spurs firms to introduce new and innovative products, as they seek to capture profitable sales from their competitors and to protect their existing sales from future challengers. In this fundamental way, competition promotes innovation. We apply this basic insight to the antitrust treatment of horizontal mergers and of exclusionary conduct by dominant firms. A merger between rivals internalizes business-stealing effects arising from their parallel innovation efforts and thus tends to depress innovation incentives. Merger-specific synergies, such as the internalization of involuntary spillovers or an increase in the productivity of R&D, may offset the adverse effect of a merger on innovation. We describe the possible effects of a merger on innovation by developing a taxonomy of cases, with reference to recent U.S. and E.U. examples. A dominant firm may engage in exclusionary conduct to eliminate the threat from disruptive firms. This suppresses innovation by foreclosing disruptive rivals and by reducing the pressure to innovative on the incumbent. We apply this broad principle to possible exclusionary strategies by dominant firms.

This is what Erik Hurst and Benjamin Wild Pugsley found when they researched the actual characteristics of small business owners, who turn out to be mostly running lifestyle businesses with no huge aspirations:

The anti-bigness stuff is at best a distraction, and at worst an actively harmful way of entrenching the privileges of the relatively privileged, while giving most people less money and worse options.

The article skates over one important aspect of local ownership. Part of the argument about small-business owners is that "these kind of local elites are often the bulwark of conservative politics." But that is a very cramped view of the role that the local business owners can play in their local communities.

The life of a community and its social organizations often depends upon the sustained engagement of people with the means and the motivation to provide meaningful support. When small businesses close and ownership is transferred out of the community, the organizations that hold the community together (libraries, sports leagues, gyms, parks) will suffer, and the community as a whole may move rapidly from vibrant to not. Yes, residents may be able to buy cheaper groceries, but the social costs might be quite high.

When I grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the 1970s, we shopped on Main St. at the local farm store, the local shoe store, the local furniture store, the local bookstore, the two local department stores. The owners of those stores were on the boards of many of the local non-profits. The city had a flourishing library, a large YMCA and a YWCA (both with pools that were available to local schools), a philharmonic orchestra, arts organizations, and other groups that were essential to the life of the community per se. By the end of the 1980s, almost all of that was gone. There were plenty of forces undermining the life of Poughkeepsie (and of so many similar cities across the country), but it is important to see that the local business owners are a core component of the local ecosystems.

These days everyone is mad at Josh Hawley for his role in fueling the insurrection at the Capitol that destabilized the government and got a bunch of people killed. But it\u2019s also worth paying some attention to Hawley as a policy thinker because he\u2019s been hailed in this regard in a variety of quarters. Most of what I\u2019ve seen of his ideas is really bad. For example, he\u2019s taken to posturing as a champion of small businesses against big chain stores \u2014 a bad left-wing idea from the 1990s that will perhaps find a new home among right-wing populists.

Specifically, right before New Year\u2019s, a social media manager at Walmart made fun of Josh Hawley for being a sore loser, which inevitably ended as it should \u2014 with the company apologizing for the inappropriate use of the company twitter account.

Now Hawley, to be clear, is just a phony. Asking employers to apologize for low wages isn\u2019t a policy. An actual policy remedy for low wages is to raise the minimum wage, which Missouri voters did over Hawley\u2019s objection. And when not too busy with his day job posting, Hawley is also a United States Senator with influence over federal law. In that capacity he has never acted to prevent the spread of chain stores or otherwise protect mom and pop businesses. So there\u2019s no reason to believe that \u201Cpopulist\u201D conservatives like Hawley pose any kind of actual threat to America\u2019s big box store sector.

The problem, to me, is that chain-bashing is a kind of socialism of fools \u2014 a shiny object that taps into economic discontent while channeling it into a blind alley and away from useful remedies.

I want to draw a distinction here between anti-bigness and antitrust policy because there\u2019s a set of influential figures who\u2019ve been working to muddy the waters here and it\u2019s confusing.

Antitrust is about competition. If Nike tried to buy Reebok there would be a serious antitrust question about monopolization of the sneaker market. The issue isn\u2019t that the combined Nike/Reebok entity would be \u201Ctoo big\u201D (there are lots of bigger companies than the two of them combined); it\u2019s a specific concern that we want companies to compete with each other rather than merge and raise prices. In theory you could have an anti-competitive cartel between three very mid-sized companies, if they happened to jointly control a market in something obscure like a particular kind of gasket or what have you.

By contrast, although McDonald\u2019s is a company that\u2019s about as big as Nike in market cap, there\u2019s really no conceivable McDonald\u2019s merger that would raise major antitrust concerns. If McDonald\u2019s merged with Starbucks, the combined entity would be much bigger than NikeReebok, but \u201Crestaurants\u201D or even \u201Cfast food\u201D would continue to be an extremely competitive market.

Walmart, in this sense, is both a very big company and a company that exists in a very competitive marketplace. Over the weekend, I went to Walmart in Ellsworth, ME and mostly bought groceries there. But there\u2019s a Shaw\u2019s and a Hannaford and a Circle K all in town selling groceries, and I do most of my Maine grocery shopping at either the Blue Hill Co-op or the Tradewinds Supermarket. I also got some hardware store type stuff there (there\u2019s a Home Depot across the parking lot, plus independent building supply stores are everywhere in Maine) and a couple of pharmacy items (there\u2019s Walgreenses everywhere, but also supermarkets sell a lot of this).

Obviously, Walmart also competes everywhere with the option of ordering stuff online, most notably from Amazon. But although I didn\u2019t buy any on this particular trip, Walmart also sells a lot of apparel, which is a market where there\u2019s a very deep set of online retailers. There\u2019s no Target or Costco in Ellsworth, but in lots of local communities, you have those retail alternatives.

The main demand from anti-bigness advocates is actually for less competition, not more. They\u2019re upset that chain stores drive mom & pop out of business. And now perhaps they\u2019re concerned that Amazon is driving chain stores out of business. But that\u2019s competition \u2014 mom & pop are asking for protection so they can maintain their geographically segmented local monopolies.

For a long time, antitrust policy in the United States looked at everything through a pretty narrow frame of consumer prices. Walmart\u2019s growth had to be good for competition because it brought prices down. Then along came Amazon and it also brought prices down. Lately there\u2019s been an interest in looking at a broader set of considerations. Cory Booker, for example, has been trying to get regulators to commit to looking at the whole playing field of labor market impacts.

That could be for all kinds of reasons. Law firms have higher average wages than restaurants because they employ lots of lawyers. But a rigorous look from Brianna Cardiff-Hicks, Francine Lafontaine, and Kathryn Shaw shows that the chain premium isn\u2019t just about selection effect \u2014 the exact same person earns more at a big box store.

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