Breaking the Monopoly: Every Food Founder Needs to Hear Stacy Mitchell's Insights
(Listen on Apple or Spotify. Full transcript below.)
When I first saw Stacy Mitchell's TED Talk titled "Why We Can't Shop Our Way to a Better Economy," I didn’t want it to end, And I knew we had to have her on the podcast.
For those unfamiliar with her work, Stacy Mitchell is the co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an organization that has spent five decades challenging neoliberal economic policies and championing local, community-oriented models.
Her perspective cuts through the noise and offers something we desperately need: evidence-based hope for a different kind of food system.
Listen Now: Breaking the Monopoly
Stacy and I dive deep into the realities of market consolidation, explore eye-opening case studies that challenge conventional wisdom about scale and efficiency, and discuss actionable strategies for food founders navigating these complex waters.
This conversation is a must-listen for any food entrepreneur who has ever wondered:
Why it's so difficult to compete with big CPG despite offering better products
How policy choices have shaped our current food landscape
What practical actions you can take beyond "voting with your dollars"
The Myth of "Bigger is Better"
Many of us in the good food community operate on a set of shared assumptions: that local is better, that small food businesses create more resilient economies, that decentralized systems are healthier for communities. But we're constantly fighting against a powerful counter-narrative that "bigger is better" – that consolidation leads to efficiency, lower prices, and economic progress.
What I love about Stacy's work is that she brings receipts.
In our conversation, she shares fascinating research and real-world examples (like North Dakota’s ban on corporate pharmacies) that challenge everything we've been told about scale and efficiency. Her insights will transform how you think about your position in the market and the structural forces at play.
The Hidden Rules Shaping Our Food System
As founders building values-driven food businesses, you're not just competing against bigger marketing budgets or more efficient operations. You're swimming upstream against a current of policies designed to favor consolidation.
Stacy illuminates these hidden rules in our conversation, revealing how specific policy decisions have systematically disadvantaged independent food businesses for decades. Understanding these dynamics isn't just interesting – it's essential knowledge for successfully building your business.
Beyond Consumer Power
One of the themes that emerged in my conversation with Stacy challenges some of our fundamental assumptions about creating change. While supporting local businesses absolutely matters, Stacy brings a refreshing perspective on what else is needed to level the playing field.
In the episode, we explore alternative approaches to systemic change that go beyond individual purchasing decisions – approaches that can be more powerful and effective for food founders wanting to build a more equitable marketplace.
Why This Episode Matters for Your Business
If you're building a good food business today, this conversation isn't just thought-provoking – it's directly relevant to your daily challenges:
Are you trying to get your products onto retail shelves? Struggling with supply chain challenges? Finding it hard to compete on price while maintaining your values?
Stacy offers insights that can help you understand these challenges in a new light and provides practical ideas for how to navigate them more effectively.
Signs of Hope
In our recent book club discussion of "Barons," I noticed many founders feeling defeated about the state of our food system. But after speaking with Stacy, I'm genuinely hopeful.
The consolidation we see today isn't inevitable – it's the result of specific policy choices that can be reversed. And while the changes needed won't happen overnight, Stacy shares compelling evidence that significant shifts are already underway. And that we can have a big impact via our local governments.
Don't Miss This Conversation
I truly believe this episode contains some of the most important insights we've shared on the Good Food CFO podcast. Whether you are a founder trying to build a thriving business, or a consumer who wants real options and better food, this conversation is for you.
After you've listened, I'd love to hear what resonated with you. Did any of Stacy's insights change how you think about your business challenges? Are you inspired to take any particular actions? Share your thoughts in the comments below or email us at hello@thegoodfoodcfo.com.
As Stacy reminded us, "This consolidation continuing is not inevitable." The future of our food system is still being written – and you have a crucial role to play in shaping it.
The Good Food CFO podcast aims to reach 1 million food founders with insights that help build a better food system. If you found value in this post, please share it with other founders who might benefit!
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Episode Timeline
00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
08:35 The Importance of Local Self-Reliance
09:45 Understanding Consolidation in Various Industries
15:06 The Myth of 'Bigger is Better'
21:47 The Impact of Antitrust Laws on Local Businesses
27:43 Consumer Choices and the Illusion of Agency
36:19 Hope for Change and Community Action
Full Episode Transcript
This episode of the Good Food CFO podcast is sponsored by Settle.
You are listening to the Good Food CFO podcast. I am your host, Sarah Delevan, and with us as always is our producer, Chelsea Stier. Chelsea, what do you have for us today? Hey, Sarah, and hey, listeners. Listen, before I answer that question, Sarah, I want to remind everyone listening of our really big goal here on the podcast, which if you remember is to reach 1 million food founders. And there's one big
freeway that everyone listening can help us, whether you're in the car or working out, maybe you're working, you know, listening while you're working. The one way you can help is to share this episode, leave us a rating, leave us a review, even subscribe on our YouTube channel. All of those things are going to help us increase our reach and get to those one million food founders.
And Sarah, this particular episode feels like a really important episode to share with friends, even your non-founder friends out there, because you're speaking with Stacy Mitchell, who is from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And this conversation covers all the different ways that the food industry needs to change.
Yeah, and I would say not just needs to change, but how that change can actually happen. For those who may not be familiar with Stacy, Stacy Mitchell is a writer. She is a strategist and she's a policy advocate. And her work focuses on dismantling concentrated corporate power and building thriving communities and a healthy democracy. She is the co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
which is an organization that for five decades now has challenged the wisdom of neoliberalism and championed local community oriented models, which is one of the big reasons that I wanted to have Stacy on the podcast. She has played a leading role in today's growing anti-monopoly movement and her insights about the importance of small independent business have really shaped the thinking of a wide range of policymakers, scholars,
and advocate. Not only that, she is the author of Big Box Swindle, The True Cost of Mega Retailers and The Fight for America's Independent Businesses. In 2016, she co-authored Amazon's Stranglehold. She's also written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, the Washington Post, and many other outlets, which we'll be sharing some of those links to those writings in our show notes. So please be sure to check that out.
She has also done a TED Talk, which the title alone was so intriguing. I had to listen to it. I talk about it during the episode. I don't want to spoil it here, but it really challenged my way of thinking too, which is something you know, Chelsea, that I love and that you love as well. So just an amazing guest to have on the podcast and so much good stuff that we talked about. Yeah. I mean, not only did you guys talk about that,
particular Ted talk, but you also talked about some of the pieces that she's written, like the piece for the Atlantic, the great grocery squeeze. There's another piece that you guys talk about, which really is about how one community is fighting back against CBS. And I learned a lot in that part of the conversation. I really loved listening to Stacy talk about her take on big business consolidation.
and all of those things that we've been talking about here as well. Yeah. I think what I found really interesting about the conversation is that after listening to the TED Talk, there were many industries that she covered and that I also wanted to touch on in our conversation outside of food in particular, because it's all interconnected, right?
It's all affecting us as consumers. It's affecting us as business owners, right? And we dive deep into that in the episode as well. But there's so much, again, that we learned. We talked about how pharmacies work and how in North Dakota, they actually have a law where there are no corporate pharmacies allowed. So it's all independent pharmacies within the state of North Dakota and what the positive effects of that are, which are counter to what
let's just say big corporations and even politicians will want to sell you on, right? This idea of bigger is better, bigger is more efficient, bigger is less expensive, bigger is X, Y, Z. And what Stacy and the Institute are finding in their research is that that's not the case, that bigger is not better. And she's bringing receipts. She's showing us exactly how when it comes to farming, when it comes to banking, when it comes to pharmacies, when it comes to food businesses,
why bigger is not necessarily better. But as you point out, Chelsea, it's not just about what is broken and what a better way could be, but also how can we get there? How do we as individuals, how do we as community members, how do we as founders actually create some change without it feeling so massively overwhelming? And also just answering the question, do we actually have a say in this?
Yeah. And can we actually do something? I'll share that during our last book club conversation, we were talking about barons and many folks came to that conversation feeling defeated, feeling like, what can we do? Are we in a losing game? And thankfully they left there feeling a bit more positive. But part of the reason for that was that I had already had this conversation with Stacy and I could bring some of her insights.
some links and some information to them from what I had learned. And so I do really think that it's inspiring and will shift a little bit of the way that we think about things. Even those of us who are already ingrained in this way of thinking and believing that local is a good thing. Yeah. She had a lot to really add to the conversation that we've been having here, not just on the podcast, but in the community and like you said, with founders, right? In the book club.
I think that we're going to share again some of those articles, but also some of the resources and links in the show notes so that everybody can start to see where they can start and not have it be super overwhelming. Yeah. We came to this episode thinking we're going to do a news story, but honestly, I think there's so much that we cover here in the episode. We don't want to overwhelm anybody with too much information. I want folks to
get to the main episode to really sink their ears into it, if you will. And we'd love to hear from you if you have an aha moment as you're listening to this episode, if you feel inspired or fired up, or maybe you're going to take some action, whether it be in your own business or in your community, we would love to hear from you. Chelsea, let folks know where they can reach out to us to share. Number one way to get ahold of us or let us know how you're feeling, what you're thinking, what you're doing.
is at hello at the goodfoodcfo.com. That is our main inbox and we will definitely see your message there. All right, Chelsea, I think we should get to it. Are you ready? Yeah, let's dive in. Good food founders, let's talk about cash flow, the metric that truly determines your ability to grow your business. We all know that figuring out your true costs, your margins and projecting cash flow isn't always as straightforward as it could be.
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Head over to settle.com slash good food to learn how brands like carnivore snacks use settle to manage their cash flow and Stacy, welcome to the podcast.
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
As I mentioned in the intro, you've written a lot of articles, you've done a lot of talks, you have a lot to say about, you know, local self-reliance, a lot to say about the consolidation of our food industry and how we can actively change, right? Or work together to change the system that we're in right now. And I want to dive into that with you. I want to start with your TED talk, because I think that for our audience of Good Food Founders, the very values driven in terms of
the businesses they're building. They're very values driven in terms of how they spend their money. But your Ted talk, it struck me and I think it'll strike them too. And I also think it's a great foundation for the rest of our conversation. I believe it was titled, Why We Can't Shop Our Way Out of Consolidation. And you mentioned that, you over the last 20 years, there's obviously consolidation in many sectors from banking to pharmaceuticals to food and farming.
And it makes it hard, for example, for a small farmer to get a fair price for their milk. And it makes it very difficult for consumers to actually have choice, right? We have choice sort of it's disguised, right? And that shopping and voting with our dollars, this sort of consumer based response, it's not likely going to get us where we need to go because it doesn't fully recognize how we got here.
in the first place. So that's like a lot that I've just shared, but I'm hoping that you can talk a bit about the narrative that we've been sold as Americans and the evidence that it's like incorrect and untrue that we've been misled.
Yeah, that's right. And I want to say that the TED talk was called, Why We Can't Sharp Our Way to a Better Economy. I want to say at the start of this that where you spend your dollars matters in the sense that like your independent bookstore, your local farmer, they need your money.
Thank you.
There's a lot you can learn also just by paying attention to how you spend your money and what your options are. It's a great way to like just sort of research and understand the workings of the economy, which can be very illuminating. So it's not that those things don't matter. They do matter, but they are not an avenue for making the kind of change that we want to see in terms of creating an economy where
communities can thrive where local businesses, small scale farms can thrive. that is not possible really by trying to shift our shopping dollars. And the reason I say that is that part of the kind of worldview, if you will, or ideology that we've been living under for the last several decades really started to gain steam in the 70s and 80s.
is this idea that the economy is something that's out there that just happens of its own accord and that, you know, it is a sort of like free market, completely free market. And I think the truth is, if you really look at it, is that all markets can only exist as a product of public policy, that we need a set of policies that structure how markets operate in the first place. And this goes back
all the way to the beginning. Like you imagine like back in hunter gatherer days, if you had two groups of humans who like met somewhere to trade their resources, there's a set of rules and parameters. Like we're going to meet in this location on that day and we're not just going to like club each other to death. We're going to actually, you know, right? So there's rules. It's policy that enabled that market, right? So at a very basic level, if you have a farmer's market in your community, it's like at a set time and there's rules about can you sell only
locally grown, like is it a 50 mile radius? know, there's all these, the weights and measures have to be accurate. The prices you post, you know, there are rules. That's what enables a market. And so I say that all to set the stage of, we were really sold a bill of goods 40, 50 years ago that the rules don't, they don't matter. Like we made the rules invisible. And I want to say corporations, large corporations in particular worked very hard to make the rules invisible.
Right.
And to just say like, yeah, you you're a consumer. If you like this, don't like this, you make a choice. That's how it works. And in doing that, what that enabled is as those rules went sort of behind the curtain, a lot of those rules got shifted. They got shifted from an economy that, from rules that favored dispersal, like our antitrust laws, our banking laws that once kept banks local and focused on serving local communities, the kinds of policies we had around agriculture.
A lot of that was dismantled and those rules were rewritten in order to allow for and actively encourage the consolidation of power by a small number of corporations. And the trick is that we've been made blind to that reality and by sort of positioning us as consumers, the effect has been that we have lost our, uh, our muscle as citizens. is kind of atrophied and we don't know how to exercise.
our citizenship muscle to change those rules again.
Yeah, I think part of it too, and you talk about this, is the idea that bigger is better, right? And so corporations sort of, and policymakers perhaps, telling American citizens, this is better. Bigger is better. It's more efficient. It's less expensive. You benefit from the growth of a small number of companies. And for example, if we talk about banking, it's going to be better for you, larger banks.
than regional banks. It's going to be better for you to shop at a Walmart, right? Because they can buy in bulk and they can sell it at a lower price. what you identified and shared in the TED Talk is that that's not actually true. And so can you share a little anecdotal information? I think you had so much great, great impactful stuff in your TED Talk, but in what ways has it been proven that bigger is not better?
Yeah, I mean, there are lots of sectors of the economy. Like part of what my organization does is goes and looks like look at the research in different sectors of the economy. Like what do we actually learn there? And this idea, you know, that bigger is better that these companies outperform because of their scale and that small is kind of outdated and not as good.
When you actually go really kick the tires on that, you discover in a lot of cases that's not true at all. In fact, it's the opposite. So an example of that that I think is really powerful is pharmacies. We've lost a lot of independent pharmacies, like lots and lots over the last couple of decades. And we have a small number of chains that now really dominate that space. And years ago, I ran across this
a funny fact, which is that the state of North Dakota does not allow corporations to operate pharmacies. There was a law they passed in the 1960s. the thinking behind it is, well, these are healthcare providers and the decisions that the business makes should be made by a licensed healthcare provider and not by some distant corporation. It's important that the decisions be made by a pharmacist.
All
pharmacies in North Dakota have to be owned by a pharmacist. So they're all locally owned except for a few that were grandfathered in, a few chains that existed before, but over 90 % of the pharmacies are independent locally owned businesses. And I thought, well, that's a fascinating case study. Like we would expect based on this bigger, that is better ideology that North Dakota would pay higher prices, that they would have fewer pharmacies, that the service wouldn't be as good. And in fact, the opposite is true. North Dakota has the most pharmacies per capita of any state.
If you are in a very small rural community in North Dakota, you're about twice as likely to have a pharmacy in your community as those same types of communities in South Dakota. And they also have among the lowest prescription drug prices of any state. And there's evidence that there's a lot more service that pharmacists are spending more time. And this is true for independent pharmacies in general, that they spend more time with their patients. They fulfill prescriptions faster.
They are more likely to have your medication in stock. They do a lot more free screenings and like healthcare counseling. They are demonstrably better than the chains at what they do. And, you know, this is kind of like then leads you to this other question, which is like, well, if, these independent pharmacies are clearly out competing the chains in North Dakota, why are they not out competing chains in New York or?
Kansas or any other state, why are they losing ground? And the answer, it turns out, is that a small number of what are known as pharmacy benefit managers, PBMs, as kind of a hidden actor in the healthcare system, there are three of them that dominate. What they do is they cover your prescription. They manage your prescription benefits. So your healthcare company hires a PBM.
They decide what drugs are covered. They decide what the pharmacist that dispenses your prescription gets paid when they dispense that prescription. They set all those sorts of terms. When they were created many, many years ago, the idea was they would create sort of efficiencies and so on, but they have become these vertically integrated companies. So the largest PBM is CVS. CVS owns Aetna Health Insurance. They own the largest PBM and they obviously own this big retail network of pharmacies. Talk about conflicts of interest.
So what have we seen? We've seen CBS steer people to its own pharmacies, use its power as a PBM, and systematically cut reimbursement rates to independent pharmacies who lose money and then close their doors. Like, there is no surprise about what's going on here. It's not that they can't compete. It's that the laws that we have to protect against this kind of market power abuse, our antitrust laws, have not been enforced in many years.
And I know that's a long story, but it an encapsulate something that we have seen in sector after sector. see it with community banks. We see it with local grocery stores. We see it with independent bookstores, lots of evidence that these businesses out compete and yet they are losing ground. And when you pull on that thread to figure out why it's because a large company or a set of large companies have grabbed hold of the market and have.
muscle them out in ways that are illegal and yet we are not enforcing our antitrust laws.
Yeah. And a lot of that is happening obviously behind the curtain, right? Like you were talking about at the top of the episode. It's happening. We're being shrouded from what is really going on. And so it's sort of like, how do you fight against something that you don't know exists? So information key. And as you said, you know, the organization that you work for is dedicated to this. And so it's an amazing resource. We're going to link to a number of your articles, which I had.
the pleasure of reading, we want to share as many of those as possible and also to the Institute of Local Self-Reliance as well, because it's a great resource for people and for business owners as well. The most recent article at the time of this recording that you wrote was, I believe, published in the Atlantic and it relates to the demise, if you will, the cause of the demise of independent grocers.
And I think that this is something extremely important to also talk about here because again, our audience is good food founders, right? They are individuals who are creating food products that are with full transparency. What are the ingredients? How are we packaging this product? How are we paying our team members? Who are we supporting in the supply chain with fair wages, right? Voting with and building a business based on values
and trying to do one of two things, either infiltrate the existing big grocery system to fight to get a better product on the shelf or choosing to remain regional and build local economies and try to strengthen them and to be a part of, you know, thriving economy, one of many hopefully successful businesses in a certain region. But as you read through your latest article, right, you come to understand the
policies that make it difficult for both of those things to happen. And I think it's really important to be transparent about that. So where do we start?
We've seen this enormous consolidation in the whole food sector over the last few decades. Supermarkets have merged. Walmart captures one out of every $4 in American spend on food. We've seen massive consolidation, obviously, the big food companies, whether it's General Mills or PepsiCo. Most of those brands in the supermarket are obviously owned by just a few giant companies. And that is a real shift. I think it's easy if you've
lived in this world to imagine that that's sort of inevitable, that that's the way it's always been. But in fact, that's a significant change that started right around 1980. It happened because we really shifted how we approach our antitrust laws. You we have these very strong antitrust laws in the US that were passed in the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. They're still all on the books and they were designed really to disperse economic power. There was a belief that
having lots of competition, markets where the market share was distributed among lots of different companies was really important. It was important because it created opportunities for people to start businesses, to get fair wages. They would have competition for their employment. It would be good for consumers. It would be good for innovation. And importantly, it would be good for our democracy because it would ensure that every community, every city had
strong local businesses, a strong economic base, and it would prevent really large companies from kind of overwhelming our government, right? So that was the thinking that went into our antitrust laws. And those laws, you know, particularly beginning in about the 1930s through really up until about the 1980s, were enforced with that mission. And, you know, the result was, if you go back, as I have done, and look at the grocery sector in the 50s, 60s,
It's remarkably diverse. There are national companies like Kroger and Safeway that are growing, but there are lots of independent businesses. know, throughout those years, as recently as the early 1980s, Americans spent more than half their grocery dollars at independent, locally owned supermarkets. So there was this tremendous choice and that applied to both sides of the market, right? So if you were a brand, if you were a company that had something to sell,
You had lots of opportunities where you could get shelf space and you could start with us with local grocers. You could grow to a small regional chain. You were not dependent on whether or not, say, a Walmart put you on their shelf. You could operate and you could stay as a small company as well because you would have retailers that were sort of scaled to your size. And then what happened in 1980 is that we really stepped back from our antitrust laws. And the most important one from the...
from the standpoint of the grocery sector is this law called the Robinson-Patman Act. And this is what I wrote about in this piece in the Atlantic that got a lot of attention. The piece is called The Great Grocery Squeeze, and it's about this history and about this change and what it did. The Robinson-Patman Act was passed in the 1930s. It's sort of part of the New Deal. And what it says is that
If you're a supplier, you have to make your products available to all of your retail customers at the same price and on the same terms. It doesn't say you can't offer a volume discount, but if you do offer a volume discount, like say selling by the truckload versus the case, that has to be based on actual cost savings. And you have to make that discount available, that volume discount available to all the retail customers.
And so what this did is it created a level playing field. If you were a large retail chain, you couldn't go to a supplier. Uh, as we see a lot today, go to a supplier, your Walmart, and you say, Hey, we're a quarter of your business. You cannot afford to lose us. And we're going to tell you and you're, and you're going to give us a cheaper price by a lot. Then you give all the other retailers that we're competing with.
You're going to give us better terms. If there are shortages, as we saw during COVID, we're going to get the product first. You're going to fulfill 98 % of our orders on time and in full. This was an actual policy that Walmart implemented. And if the grocery store down the streets got an empty shelf, too bad. So when this law was suspended in 1980, it unleashed the ability of big retail chains to squeeze suppliers to demand preferential treatment.
and to really shift the playing field. And over time, as suppliers gave Walmart and Kroger these big discounts and this favorable treatment, it created what economists have found was a waterbed effect. you know, cheaper prices for Walmart, those suppliers had to make up for it by charging independent grocers and small regional chains even higher prices. And so over time, the difference has gotten to be quite extreme.
And of course, you're an independent grocery store, regional chain. You you can't afford that. And one of the reasons that we've seen so many local grocery stores closed, particularly in low income communities, the reason that we have food deserts is because we stopped enforcing this law. We are really at a moment where there is growing attention to our antitrust laws and what it is that we lost when we stopped enforcing them.
Yeah. We had a independent grocery owner in Philadelphia on the show several seasons ago and I'm quoting him and I hope I'm getting this right. He said something to the effect of, can't buy some products for what Walmart sells them for. So how do you compete? Something else I want to talk about because we have a bit of limited time and there's like, there's so much I want to squeeze in, but recently
That's right. That's right.
As we're recording this, it's early February. Donald Trump has been in office for about a month. There's a lot happening. I'm seeing a lot of posts on social media about this idea of voting with your dollar and purchasing in values aligned ways. And I think that we're walking a fine line if we haven't crossed over it in some instances where we're creating an environment of shame based on where
you spend your dollars. And where this is coming from for me is, you know, I can think of values-based businesses, people who are making 99 % of their purchasing decisions as a business fully aligned with their values. Same with, you know, individuals, right, who are just sort of doing the best they can, but in some instances, they either feel they have no choice or for whatever the reason is, right, they're not buying 100 % aligned with their values.
And you and I had a conversation previously about why that is and what the actual physical and like real limitations are on some businesses and individuals actually being able to be fully values aligned with their purchasing. And I think this is a really important thing to talk about right now, because I don't want us to slip into a space of shame or shaming people for how they're purchasing.
Yeah, I I just don't think that this is a path to the change that we need. And there are lot of reasons for that, but one of them is simply a matter of information. Like it is impossible for us, all of us collectively to have all the information about all the things that we're buying, whether it's issues around child labor, whether it's issues around environmental pollution.
company ownership. mean, you shopping in the grocery store is a great example of that. You can pull all sorts of things off the shelf that seem like local brands. But if you know, you know, if you do the research, you'll find out, this is owned by a conglomerate that does a lot of bad things. individuals just cannot possibly, you would need like a supercomputer in your pocketbook while you shopped to like figure that out all the time, right? You know, it just doesn't make any, any sense that we can bring all of our values to bear in the marketplace. the
But the deeper reason that that I don't think is the way to go is that the policy choices that are being made and the choices that are being made in boardrooms structure our choices. Like our choices are determined far before we get there to make them. And so if I live in a community that has a very limited number of grocery stores, there are a lot of metro areas where Walmart
absolutely dominates, has more than 50 % of grocery sales, in some cases 70, 80, 90 % of grocery sales. And I walk into Walmart and what they have on the shelf is Coke and Pepsi. Like I don't have a choice right there about choosing a different brand in that case. It's already been made for me. So I don't think this is viable. think we actually really need to, and I think it's, I think corporations really benefit when we get into this mindset. And I want to say like,
you know, when you're supporting your local farmer or your local bookstore or a great brand, like that matters. They need your dollars. Like I'm not saying it doesn't matter. I'm just saying it's not actually a path to the kind of systemic, bigger picture change that we need. And I think corporations really benefit when we kind of linger in this idea that this is how to solve our problem because they know that as consumers, we're very weak.
Right. We only have the choices they give us. We only have the options in front of us. It's hard for us to like aggregate all of us to do the same thing. Enough of us, you know, choosing the same thing at the same time to make a real change. Like it's very difficult to make, you boycotts just do not work. There's a lot of history of that. Right. Cause you just can't get enough people on any one issue to actually fix it no matter how bad and outrageous the problem is. And corporations love that. They love to say, yeah, we'll just vote with your dollars. Meanwhile.
They are on Capitol Hill and in your state house writing rules that ensure that our lending capital, that big banks are consolidating, that our capital markets for big companies work just fine. Meanwhile, small businesses are seeing community banks disappear. The kinds of lenders that serve them best are disappearing, not because they can't compete, but because of the ways that we've changed banking laws. Meanwhile, Amazon is paying effectively.
a zero federal tax rate. You know, meanwhile, the store down the street for me, the local retailer is typically paying an effective federal tax rate of 20, 25%. Why in the world? Like on what grounds does it make any sense that a local business employing people occupying a space in my community owned by one of my neighbors is under a tax burden that is fundamentally diametrically different from what the biggest company that they're competing with is paying?
So as long as we stay in this consumer mindset, we are not actually addressing the underlying problem.
Yeah, we had a book club recently. The selection was Barron's and I your name is, you you've got a quote on the back of the book. And afterward, I got a couple of emails that said, you know, after reading this book, I was actually quite down. And you and I had had a conversation before the book club. And I took with me some of what we had talked about and some of what you're sharing.
here. And I talked about policy and I talked about, yes, it feels difficult to have voting with our dollars be the only way, but there's power in knowing that that's not the only way and that we can affect change on the local and state level. while there is the FTC, right? And they can bring federal cases as they did with Kroger and Albertson, there's also state laws.
And Kroger Albertson, I think was a great example because Colorado, was it Colorado? believe that they continued their state case against the merger, despite the federal case coming to an end and having a judgment, because they wanted to ensure in Colorado that all the rules that were broken, right, that they were held accountable for them and that there was an outcome specific to the state there. And that gave people hope.
And I think that policy as a word, I think is also a little overwhelming for people because they're like, well, how do I get involved in policy? And quite frankly, I'm at the beginning stages of that myself, but the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has tools and information to help us do that. So to come out of a book club meeting where people were sharing that they live in rural America and they are commodity farmers and they're
good people, right? That's another part of this. There's nuance to everything, I think, right? Especially around our food and the individual people who are growing it. And they only have a Walmart to shop at. And it's far away. And so how do they, while supporting a family, while running a business, while doing all these things, it's like, what other choice do I have? And what you shared in our other conversation was if you come together as a community,
and you can speak to the policymakers in your area. Not that it will be very, you know, super easy, you can, your voice can be heard and you can affect change so that you have another option or so that maybe Walmart or Amazon are taxed in accordance with local business in your area, right? It's about leveling that playing field. And what can we do? Because wouldn't it be nice to have choices and to be able to purchase from whoever
really is the best fit for you as a person or a business without sort of all of the bad feelings and stuff that comes along with purchasing from a particular company.
Yeah, I feel, you know, I've been working on this set of issues for over 20 years. I don't even want to say how long. It's been a long time, right? And I feel much more hopeful in the last few years than I have throughout that because things have really begun to shift in dramatic and important ways. So the biggest shift is on the sort of ideological level, if I can put it that way, or the sort of broader consciousness, the way people view things.
This idea that policy doesn't matter and the economy sort of floats along separately, that's gone out the window. And I think it started to fall apart during the financial crisis. was sort of like we pulled back the curtain and went, wait a second, this whole system is kind of like rigged and the big banks are in league with the regulators and who wrote these laws and why isn't anyone accountable that did that? That really started this process of going, wait a second.
you this is a system that is set up to benefit the powerful at the expense of everyone else. And once the kind of wool came off, you people started seeing this more clearly, it only grew from there. And beginning sort of around 2016, we started to see for the first time, literally in decades, high, high level
know, policymakers in Congress saying, wait a second, anti-monopoly laws. We have these anti-monopoly laws, like where are the agencies that are supposed to be enforcing these things? And we saw that the Democratic party and the Republican party in 2016 reintroduce antitrust into their party platforms. It had been absent for decades. Now it was back in. So there was this shift and there's been a lot of academic research. There's been just policymakers, people working on these issues.
food access issues have gone, wait a second, the laws, like we can't just fix this. There are these laws. What should we, you And so that's been a really important change. And when President Biden came in, he dusted off these laws. He took a really different approach than Obama had taken, than Bill Clinton had taken. Bill Clinton and Obama were very much aligned with this bigger is better ideology that we don't need.
to worry about small business and in fact, you we should allow and encourage consolidation. They believed that. They thought it would be beneficial for people in different ways. Biden disagreed fundamentally and really looked at the research of the time and went in a very different direction. And so we have seen leaders over the last few years at the FTC and the Department of Justice who have dusted off our anti-monopoly laws. We have had seen some banking regulators that started to do that in the banking area. We got major lawsuits filed.
We got new merger guidelines. We just got all of this new attention to it. Where we are right now is that there is a bit of that activity over the last few years has been somewhat bipartisan. There have been conservatives in Congress, conservatives at these agencies on the Federal Trade Commission who have supported these laws. For example, the Robinson-Pattman law that we talked about that's so important to level the playing field in the grocery sector.
We have conservative members and Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission who have said that that law, enforcing that law matters. And that's so different than even just five years. I mean, it's just, I can't even tell you how different that is. I don't know under this administration, especially given the chaos like that we're going to see, I don't know what's going to happen. But I don't think that we're going to go back to where we were. We may not go.
very far forward from the federal level, but I don't think we're going to go back. I don't think you can put the genie back in the bottle, as it were, on this issue people have seen. And then the other thing is what you alluded to, which is that states have been completely active in all of this. There's been a lot of focus on what the federal government has been doing, but meanwhile, state attorneys general have had this same epiphany and gone, wait a second, there is something, we have a deeply unequal economy and we have laws. Not only state attorneys general can enforce our federal antitrust laws,
And they also have their own state antitrust laws that they can enforce. And so a lot of the action, you know, there's the, major monopolization case against Amazon, which, you know, could lead to the company being broken up and really open up a lot of opportunity for, for small companies that are trying to sell online, but have been squeezed and blocked by Amazon. That lawsuit has a bunch of states signed on as well. It's not just a federal lawsuit.
And you mentioned the Kroger Albertsons merger, which has been blocked now by two courts. Not only the federal case where the judge said, yeah, we agree with the feds. This is a bad merger. That's the first supermarket merger that the federal government has challenged in decades. And they won. And they won with a theory that said consolidation is bad. Like the old way of doing antitrust was wrong. And the judge said, yeah, we agree with you. That's a really big deal.
And then the other case is the Washington state case, you know, also, and, Colorado, as you noted, brought its own and is sort of continuing down that path because they have some different claims that they want to see sort of see addressed. States are taking on all kinds of these problems. Many of them have their own sort of mini Robinson Patman acts. And so we expect this issue of price discrimination and retail. We're going to see states beginning to take that up. So I feel really encouraged and just to bring it back to like, okay, what can you do?
At the local level, I think it's so important to be talking to your neighbors and to be talking about these kinds of issues. We have a lot of tools at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance to help you do that and to kind of understand how some of this stuff works. But there are neighborhood groups, church-based groups, community groups, and in every place. getting involved in those and beginning to talk about how...
this set of laws, this set of policies relates to inequality, relates to food deserts, relates to why your community isn't thriving is really important, relates to oligarchy, relates to the power that companies have over government, and then beginning to do some advocacy with your local elected leaders. It makes a huge difference when you have a mayor or a city counselor, for example, stand up and say, we're struggling with food deserts in part of my city.
And in order to fix that, we need our antitrust laws enforced. I can't tell you the impact that has on AGs and even at the federal level. And it is within everybody's power to reach their mayor and get them to do that.
That's so helpful. There are a couple of stats that you also shared, believe within the TED talk that I want to share here. I don't have the timeframe for this, so maybe you can help me out with that. These were just sort of my personal notes that I was jotting down as I was listening to it, but farmers markets have doubled in recent years. Over 1400 new locally owned grocery stores, more than 500 new independently owned bookstores.
more than 6,000 people have moved their accounts to local and regional banks. This is last year alone. So maybe you can put a time frame on that, maybe not. I jotted them down as just like exciting metrics that change is happening, right? And then with active vocal communication to our policymakers, more of this can happen and we can have more access to the types of businesses that we
want to do business with, which is really exciting. And that message of this consolidation, like continuing is not inevitable.
Absolutely. mean, so I gave that talk in 2012. those are like, yeah, so we're going back a little bit ways on some of those stats. But I think what they illustrate and we still see today is that there is at the local level, this kind of like real desire that people have to have like a real local economy, to be able to go places and go to businesses that are owned by your neighbors. And we have a real entrepreneurial
spirit in this country. And I think some of the stats that I would give that would be more current is that during COVID, during the lockdowns, we saw this like dramatic increase in the formation of small businesses, like people who now had the time and because of some of the federal financial help had the sort of cushion, the safety net to go start a business that they'd always dreamed of. we had this huge uptick in business formation.
You know, we've been, I've been very focused on this issue of grocery. And so it's been interesting to see we've been working with the community of North Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma. They were a 14 year food desert overrun with dollar stores. And they now through a lot of community work have this beautiful locally owned grocery store called Oasis Fresh Market. And so we've seen folks all over the country who want to open grocery store, know, open grocery stores in the communities that they're from.
serve their neighbors. That's the really great news. And then if we compare that, so I think this desire to build the kind of local economy where we're all connected to one another and where we really get to be part of our neighbors and have some agency in our lives, feel like we're part of a place where we control our own destiny, our own future. I think people really are yearning for that. And you can see that in some of these stats. And the trick now is
can we get our policymakers at the state and federal level to actually put in place the policies that would really enable that to thrive? Because this is like a bunch of flowers that are blooming and whether they sort of continue to grow and proliferate is really going to depend on the environment that we create through our policy. And so that's what really drives the work that we do. We're excited about the change and we'd love to have more people get involved with us in doing that.
Amazing. Well, on that note, can you let people know where they can learn more about the Institute and about you?
Yeah. So the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we're at ilsr.org. You can find us online. We have a lot of resources. We're a 50-year-old organization. We're about 30 people across the country working on a variety of issues, sort of local business issues that I've been highlighting. We also work on small-scale renewable energy, community-owned broadband, community composting. We do a lot of different things at the local level, and then we sort of fight these big policy battles.
When you go there, if you look at like, get involved, I think is one of the top menu links, you can sign up for our newsletters. And that's just a great way to like, kind of keep up with the new resources we have, different ways of getting involved. You can find us on all the socials. You can find me on Blue Sky and Twitter, Stacy Mitchell. So we'd love to connect and have you involved in our work.
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Stacy. I so appreciate it and I hope to talk to you again soon.
That's great. Thank you so much.
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