Food Deserts

CHRIS BERUBE: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Chris Berube sitting in this week for Roman Mars. In Woonsocket, Rhode Island, there’s one surefire way to get yourself clocked as an out-of-towner. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Is it “woon-socket?”

JEANNE MICHON: “Wuhn.” “Wuhn-socket.”

JAYSON DE LEON: “Wuhn-socket.”

JEANNE MICHON: Yep. 

JAYSON DE LEON: No double O. 

JEANNE MICHON: No “woo.”. 

JAYSON DE LEON: No “woo.”

CHRIS BERUBE: This past spring, producer Jayson De Leon drove to, uh, “wuhn-socket,” which is just a few miles up the road from where he lives. 

JAYSON DE LEON: And in Woonsocket, I met up with Jeanne Michon. Jeanne is Native American and French-Canadian. So, technically, her name is… 

JEANNE MICHON: “Zh-ahn.” God’s gift to man–that’s what it means. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Really? 

JEANNE MICHON: Yeah, my mother had a sense of humor. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Pronunciations aside, everyone calls her “Jeanne.” And Jeanne is third generation Woonsocket. She grew up there in the 1970s, and back then, she said, the city had some stuff going for her. 

CHRIS BERUBE: There were places to hang out, like the local movie theater or the skating rink or the arcade. And because she loved to cook, Jeanne remembers always jumping at the chance to go with her mom to the grocery store. 

JEANNE MICHON: And that was the biggest thing ever. “Woo, let’s go! We’re going shopping with mom! Woohoo! No, you’re not getting nothing.”

JAYSON DE LEON: At the time, Jeanne’s family had a lot of options for grocers. There were small, locally-owned stores like Fernandes Produce and Big D’s. The city also had supermarkets for regional chains like Star Market and Almacs. The way some of these local shops bag groceries always mesmerized young Jeanne. After ringing them up, a cashier would place the groceries in a box on a giant conveyor belt, which would crank out the side of the building. 

JEANNE MICHON: And everybody knew that you park there, and then it’ll come out to you. You know, dad would wait in the car while my mom and the kids were shopping, throwing whatever in the boxes.

JAYSON DE LEON: As the years went on, Woonsocket’s economy took a turn for the worse. For decades, factory jobs had employed a lot of the city. But those jobs left. And pretty soon, the local movie theater closed. So did the skating rink and the arcade. 

JEANNE MICHON: Then the grocery stores started disappearing. We used to have Star Market, which was always packed on Diamond Hill, and then that one left. 

JAYSON DE LEON: One by one, local grocers shut their doors and never reopened. The decline was so dramatic that today, in Woonsocket, a city of 45,000, there’s only one grocery store–a Price Rite out on the edge of town. 

JEANNE MICHON: It’s sad that people don’t have other choices to make. And I’m not knocking Price Rite, but when you have no choice but to go to one place, it’s like that’s the oasis in the desert. The only spot that they can go to get refreshed is at this Price Rite. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Woonsocket is what’s known as a food desert. These are low-income communities where it’s hard to find groceries. According to the USDA, in a city like Woonsocket, that means lots of residents live more than a mile from the nearest grocery store. 

JAYSON DE LEON: And while a mile in a city may not sound like much, according to the latest census information, nearly 20% of Woonsocket’s residents don’t have access to a vehicle. Pair that with unreliable public transportation, and suddenly, a simple task like grabbing groceries can become a real struggle. 

CHRIS BERUBE: On its face, the story of how Woonsocket turned into a food desert seems pretty straightforward. The city fell on hard times, then businesses abandoned ship, and now it’s harder to get basic things like groceries. 

JAYSON DE LEON: But the actual story of how Woonsocket and places like it became food deserts is more complicated than that. 

STACY MITCHELL: The common assumption about why food deserts exist, both in the academic literature and among policymakers, is that these are communities that can’t support a supermarket. You know, they’re either too poor or too small to generate enough spending on groceries and therefore can’t afford a supermarket.

JAYSON DE LEON: Stacy Mitchell is a food researcher and co-executive director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And she thinks this general understanding of food deserts misses the bigger picture. 

STACY MITCHELL: Food deserts didn’t used to exist. You know, poverty has been with us forever, but food deserts only arose in the late 1980s. And so this explanation that we have that food deserts are really kind of like there’s something wrong with the community–like the community itself is deficient in some way and therefore can’t support a supermarket–that’s not actually why we have food deserts. Everybody eats. Poor neighborhoods spend a lot of money on grocery stores. It’s not that there’s not enough spending in these neighborhoods. Like, something else happened. 

JAYSON DE LEON: It’s easy to think of food deserts as a natural consequence of poverty. But in communities like Woonsocket, grocery stores stuck around well into the 1990s, long after the factories closed and the city’s fortunes faded. Stacy Mitchell says the real reason these food deserts emerged all across the country is because of a decades-long battle over one policy. 

The story of this policy fight starts with the rise of one of America’s first national grocery chains: the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P. 

A&P ’80S AD: We watch our P’s and Q’s and A and D! We know you’ll be back for these little green guys! They’re our specials of the week! 

CHRIS BERUBE: A&P started as a tea company in Lower Manhattan. But at the turn of the 20th century, the retailer expanded into the grocery business. At the time, the industry was mostly composed of small, independent neighborhood grocers. These mom-and-pop shops would often take orders by phone and then deliver them to your house. They also operated on a credit system. So, instead of settling the bill with every purchase, customers would just pay a tab at the end of the month. 

JAYSON DE LEON: However, deliveries can get expensive. And operating on a credit system exposed these grocers to big losses. Sometimes people just didn’t pay up. So, to cover shortfalls, they’d often mark up their prices. But with the arrival of A&P came a new business model. 

CHRIS BERUBE: A&P did away with deliveries and purchases on credit. Instead, at your local A&P, customers would approach the counter and pay on the spot with cash. They also cut costs by vertically integrating their business. The company owned manufacturing facilities, which produced A&P branded products, which they sold in A&P stores–all of which helped them offer the lowest prices in town. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Prioritizing low prices is a pretty simple change, but it was existential for all of those mom and pop shops. 

STACY MITCHELL: There’s a lot of alarm across the country about A&P. They’re opening all of these stores. They’re putting lots of local grocers out of business and really just taking over the market very rapidly. 

JAYSON DE LEON: By the early 1930s, A&P had expanded from grocery stores in the New York metro area to more than 15,000 stores nationwide. While other chain stores existed, A&P perfected the model. Even in places like Woonsocket, A&P had multiple stores throughout the city. 

CHRIS BERUBE: And with all that growth, A&P achieved something no retailer in America had ever done before. It produced more than a billion dollars in sales. 

JAYSON DE LEON: And the company used all this money and power as a weapon. In negotiations with suppliers, A&P knew that it had the upper hand. And so the company leveraged its size, not only to get the very best deals, but to make life harder on their competition. 

STACY MITCHELL: The reason that A&P is growing so rapidly is that it’s squeezing suppliers. It’s going to suppliers and saying, “We’re your biggest customer. And we want you to give us big discounts and other favors while raising the prices that you’re charging our competitor down the street.”

JAYSON DE LEON: This is what’s known as the waterbed effect. When suppliers charged A&P less for its products, they made up for it by charging more to the small neighborhood grocers. So, like a waterbed, if you sit on one side, the other side goes up. 

STACY MITCHELL: So, in effect, what drives A&P’s growth is that it has this kind of leverage that comes purely from its size. 

JAYSON DE LEON: In the 1930s, A&P was viewed by many as a monopoly, and its size was a huge issue in the country. The company was known to blacklist suppliers who didn’t bend to their will. It also extracted big fees from farmers and manufacturers to carry their products. From the federal government all the way down to high school debate classes, people argued about A&P and how big is too big. 

STACY MITCHELL: A&P is, like, changing the fabric of neighborhoods and of towns, you know? It’s coming in and running out of business a lot of local businesses, so there’s this big backlash all across the country. 

CHRIS BERUBE: This pushback against A&P was part of a wider movement against chain stores in general. In small towns throughout the Midwest and the South, big chains threatened local businesses. And because A&P was the biggest chain store, it became the target of communities nationwide. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Municipal governments tried to help small local grocers by taxing A&P. Some even passed laws to limit the number of stores it could open in a county. In Shreveport, Louisiana, a local radio station ran a whole program focused on fighting chain stores. A musician named Andrew Jenkins had a message for communities facing a takeover by the likes of A&P. 

ANDREW JENKINS: Now let us give you warning, don’t let us plead in vain. Don’t send your money to Wall Street and bind yourselves with chains. So, let us all be kind and true and meet this issue straight and trade with the hometown merchants before it is too late… 

CHRIS BERUBE: In the 1930s, the anger with chain stores was also part of a broader frustration with the economy. Many people felt the system just wasn’t serving the working class. After all, A&P crossed a billion dollars in sales during the Great Depression. While the low prices helped cash-strapped Americans, it was notable that A&P’s rise coincided with the lowest point in many people’s lives. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Soon, Congress picked up on all this outrage. A&P built up its power during an era of relatively lax antitrust enforcement. But as part of FDR’s New Deal, corporate power was under intense scrutiny. And with one new piece of legislation, two lawmakers set their sights on breaking up the power of A&P. 

STACY MITCHELL: So, in 1936, they passed a law called the Robinson-Patman Act. And it’s an antitrust law, and it outlaws what is known as price discrimination. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The Robinson-Patman Act was the brainchild of Senator Joseph Robinson from Arkansas and Congressman Wright Patman from Texas. And it gave the federal government a new tool to rein in monopolistic power. The law was even nicknamed the “Anti-A&P Act.”

JAYSON DE LEON: For years, A&P pressured suppliers into giving them the best deals. But the Robinson-Patman Act changed that dynamic. It outlawed price discrimination, which means that whatever sweet deal A&P received from a supplier had to be the same sweet deal offered to other retailers, including small, independent grocers. 

STACY MITCHELL: The law makes it illegal for suppliers to provide different prices to different buyers. It also makes it illegal for retailers that have market power to demand special deals, discounts, and other kinds of favorable treatment. 

JAYSON DE LEON: One big hang up that people had with the Robinson-Patman Act is this idea that it banned the bulk discounts. But that’s not exactly true. Big chains could still get a lower price for buying in bulk. Other retailers just needed access to the same terms. The goal was to make retailers compete over things like innovation, product selection, and customer service, rather than using purely market power to shove competition out. 

CHRIS BERUBE: A&P tried to persuade the public that its size wasn’t a problem. In a magazine profile, the president of the company warned that breaking up their power would actually raise grocery prices. And in one newspaper ad, A&P thumbed its nose at antitrust enforcers by showing a picture of the Empire State Building, with a caption that read, “It’s far too big. It ought to be Seven Buildings.”

JAYSON DE LEON: Still, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice kept pressuring the company. And after Robinson-Patman went into effect, the changes to the grocery business were almost immediate. The law ate into A&P’s profits. And within a few years, the company’s exponential growth looked a lot more like normal growth. The steep decline of the small neighborhood grocer was headed off. 

STACY MITCHELL: A&P is no longer aggressively gobbling up the entire market. They’re stopped from doing that, but they’re still a force. 

JAYSON DE LEON: The Robinson-Patman Act didn’t destroy A&P, it just stopped the company from abusing its power. Big chain grocers continued to thrive and operate nationwide, and small grocers could still serve their communities. There was a semblance of balance in the grocery business. 

STACY MITCHELL: Independent grocers, including single-location grocery stores and very small, like, family-owned chains that had a handful of stores–those retailers maintain more than half of all grocery sales from the 1940s all the way through the early 1980s. So, from a consumerist perspective, it’s like the best of both worlds because almost every neighborhood has this choice. You know, if you want to shop at an independent grocery store, you have that option. But if you prefer to shop at, say, Kroger or Safeway, you also have that option. There’s this incredible diversity and variety and competition, and it’s all really resting on the fact that we had the Robinson-Patman Act and enforced it. 

JAYSON DE LEON: For decades, the Robinson-Patman Act helped create a more level playing field in the grocery business. But it would soon get swept up in a huge campaign to rewrite the rules of American antitrust. 

CHRIS BERUBE: After the break, one man’s quest to break the Robinson-Patman Act, and the rise of food deserts… 

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JAYSON DE LEON: From the 1930s into the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission aggressively enforced the Robinson-Patman Act. It issued citations and cease and desist orders to companies who violated the law. This had the effect of reining in powerful chains like A&P. It also acted as a deterrent to other businesses who might be on the verge of their very own monopolistic power trip. 

CHRIS BERUBE: But the backlash from big business was always coming. Since the New Deal, antitrust laws like Robinson-Patman acted as a check on corporate power. But in the 1970s, a new school of economic thought took hold. It argued that traditional FDR-era antitrust enforcement was actually holding the American economy back. And to unlock America’s full economic potential, we needed to completely rethink antitrust. 

STACY MITCHELL: A key figure in the dismantling of our antitrust laws is Robert Bork. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Robert Bork was a professor of antitrust law at Yale, but he’s probably best known for his political career. He was the one who carried out Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. The Saturday Night Massacre? That’s Robert Bork. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Bork’s name was also famously turned into a verb after his failed confirmation to the Supreme Court. “He got borked!”

JAYSON DE LEON: As an academic, Bork was part of this rising tide of scholars trying to reshape antitrust in a more free market direction. And to help do that, he published a book in 1978 that became a manifesto for the movement. 

STACY MITCHELL: He writes this book called The Antitrust Paradox, and–you know–it is a kind of bestseller, if you will, for a policy book. And it has this incredible influence across the right and even to some degree among Democrats. 

JAYSON DE LEON: In The Antitrust Paradox, Bork argues that, for decades, American antitrust claimed to be about protecting competition and consumers. But in reality, antitrust only protected inefficient companies and punished the successful ones. And this paradox, he said, actually harmed consumers because it led to higher prices.

CHRIS BERUBE: At the time, Bork’s argument had a receptive audience. The American economy struggled during the ’70s with high inflation and low growth. Grocery prices were skyrocketing. And Bork insisted traditional antitrust enforcement was making things worse. And he didn’t just throw tomatoes from the sidelines. In his book, Robert Bork laid out a new vision for antitrust–one that he claimed was based on a close, accurate reading of the nation’s first antitrust laws. 

STACY MITCHELL: Bork very much believed that corporations should be free to wield their power and do what they want and that the laws that we’d always understood to mean that we should disperse power and that we should prevent too much consolidation–that’s not really what those laws were about. 

JAYSON DE LEON: He thought that antitrust was all about efficiency. And big corporations tend to be more efficient. So you know what? We should actually use antitrust to encourage corporate consolidation.

STACY MITCHELL: So, he turned antitrust on its head. 

JAYSON DE LEON: In Robert Bork’s view, antitrust enforcement had been overly concerned with fairness. After all, fairness was subjective. A truly objective policy would use what he called the “consumer welfare standard.” And this new standard he came up with focused on prices over basically everything else. 

STACY MITCHELL: Part of how Bork and his cohort sell this idea is by saying that prices are measurable–efficiency is measurable–like it’s like one North Star. We can point antitrust to this– Like, there’s an answer to the problem. Or any question that’s asked–we can find an answer. “Is this merger good or bad?” “Well, will it lead to lower prices?” That’s one question and one answer that then guides policy. That’s the thinking behind it. 

JAYSON DE LEON: And to really help drive home his case for the consumer welfare standard, Robert Bork turned the Robinson-Patman Act into his punching bag. 

ROBERT BORK: It should be said that almost the scholarly opinion on all sides of the antitrust issue is that the Robinson-Patman Act is a peculiarly pernicious statute…

JAYSON DE LEON: In his book, Bork calls the law “antitrust’s least glorious hour.” Elsewhere, he called it “the typhoid Mary of antitrust.”

CHRIS BERUBE: Robert Bork didn’t just dislike the Robinson-Patman Act, he loathed it. So, in his writing, he characterized it as this crazy, stupid law. 

STACY MITCHELL: And he creates this environment where, for decades, any economist worth their salt–any legal scholar worth their salt–would never say that the Robinson-Patton Act was a good thing. Like, you couldn’t venture it. Your professional career would be sort of destroyed by saying that. It would be like saying the Earth is flat, you know? 

CHRIS BERUBE: In the ’80s, Bork’s ideas made the leap from the page into the halls of power. All throughout government, antitrust positions were filled with appointees who agreed with Bork’s philosophy. Laws were reinterpreted and new policy guidelines were issued. The Bork era of antitrust was underway, and it was built on the consumer welfare standards. 

JAYSON DE LEON: And in this new era, the Robinson-Patman Act wasn’t so much killed by authorities as it was disappeared. 

STACY MITCHELL: They just kind of decided, “Well, we’re just going to put that law up on a shelf, and we’re not going to enforce it.”

JAYSON DE LEON: For decades, the Robinson-Patman Act remained up on that shelf, gathering dust, still technically a law but ignored. The occasional person might come by and flip through it like an old photo album, but it was understood through different administrations, Republican and Democrat, that this was a of the past–a relic of a bygone era of antitrust. 

CHRIS BERUBE: That is, until the 2010s, when some prominent researchers and legal scholars started to really assess the impacts of its retirement. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Is it almost, like, literally the case that businesses are checking the antitrust landscape and are just like, “Nobody’s looking at Robinson-Patman anymore, so do whatever you want”?

LINA KHAN: Absolutely. I mean, I had lawyers and even a general counsel at a company tell me that they don’t even advise their companies to follow the Robinson-Patman Act because it’s not enforced. 

JAYSON DE LEON: This is Lina Khan. She was appointed chair of the FTC under President Biden. Khan is often talked about as the antidote to Robert Bork, which is kind of funny because they’re both Yale Law School alums. 

LINA KHAN: Yeah, the class where I learned antitrust law in law school had a big portrait of Bork in the back. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Did having that portrait behind you make you feel any kind of way? 

LINA KHAN: It felt very apt. I mean, Robert Bork has taught at Yale Law School. The professor who was still teaching antitrust had been close with Bork–kind of a colleague of his–and so it felt very fitting in that way. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Khan is one of the leaders of what’s known today as the “anti-monopoly movement.” And she first rose to prominence after writing a paper that really stuck it to Bork. It’s titled Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox. And as far as academic papers go, it was a real bombshell, setting off big debates in antitrust circles. 

JAYSON DE LEON: In her research, Lina Khan says that understanding antitrust through Bork’s framework is entirely too narrow. It allowed companies like Amazon to amass power with very little scrutiny. And she thought this level of consolidated power has actually resulted in bad outcomes not just for consumers, but for society. 

CHRIS BERUBE: And one way to plainly show these bad outcomes is by looking at what happened to the grocery business. 

JAYSON DE LEON: When the government deep-sixed Robinson-Patman, it was too late for the grocery giant, A&P. The company eventually went out of business. But in its place, another goliath had emerged: Walmart. 

CHRIS BERUBE: In the late 1980s, Walmart entered the grocery business and quickly took a page out of A&P’s playbook from back in the day. 

LINA KHAN: Well, once the Robinson-Patman Act is shelved, you see big retailers, like Walmart, start demanding discounts from their suppliers–and not just demanding discounts, but demanding that they get systematically lower prices than what their rivals are getting. 

JAYSON DE LEON: The suspension of Robinson-Patman created a new incentive in the industry. Who could get bigger faster? Because the faster you grew, the quicker you could leverage your size over suppliers. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The incentive to get bigger faster resulted in a massive merger spree in the 1990s. Independent and even regional grocers were swallowed up by the big national chains, like Kroger and Albertsons and Safeway, all of which are huge companies in their own right. But even they were looking to bulk up. 

LINA KHAN: Certainly when the big grocers have been consolidating, one of the arguments that they make is that we need to get bigger so that we can actually get the same discriminatory discounts that the big guys are. 

JAYSON DE LEON: This new dynamic in the grocery business–rampant consolidation in search of the lowest prices–absolutely decimated small neighborhood grocers. The waterbed effect was in full effect. Big chains like Walmart could extract discounts from suppliers and, in turn, suppliers would make up for any shortfalls by charging smaller stores more. 

LINA KHAN: In effect, what you have then is the smaller retailers subsidizing the discounts that Walmart is getting. And what’s going to happen over the long run is those independent grocers are going to get squeezed and are going to get pushed out of the market. 

CHRIS BERUBE: For people in places like Woonsocket, Rhode Island, all this consolidation meant more residents had to rely on big chains for groceries. Walmart opened a store in Woonsocket back in 1994. And as the company captured a bigger slice of the market, locally owned grocers felt the pressure. Many of them closed.

JAYSON DE LEON: But in a pattern that has played out in lots of communities, after Walmart helped drive a bunch of grocers out of business, Walmart closed too, only to open a new store in a more central location a few miles down the road in another town. Here’s Stacy Mitchell again. 

STACY MITCHELL: You know, kind of looking back at this history, the sort of question becomes– Well, you can understand how the suspension of Robinson-Patman led to the demise of independent grocers. But the question becomes, like, well, why didn’t chains fill those gaps? And the answer is that they didn’t have to because “we know people have to eat, so they’re gonna come out to our other stores, and we don’t have to actually spend the money to operate a store in the neighborhood.”

JAYSON DE LEON: When Walmart or another big chain leaves town, they don’t just abandon the place. Sometimes they make it impossible for other competitors to move in. For example, Walmart owns most of their buildings. And when they sell it, they can impose a restriction on the deed, banning, say, another grocer from opening up in the same place. These “scorched earth covenants,” as they’re called, can last decades. So, not only are the scales tipped in their favor, but some national grocers are known to salt the earth on their way out. 

CHRIS BERUBE: This is the playbook Walmart used to become America’s grocer. Today, the company captures one in every $4 American spend on groceries. In some metro areas, Walmart has captured half the grocery market. In others, the number is closer to 70%. 

STACY MITCHELL: This is a level of power that is way beyond anything that A&P ever got to. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Stacy Mitchell and Lina Khan both agree that the decline of small local grocers paired with the rise of Walmart and other big national chains has fundamentally altered the food landscape, especially in low-income neighborhoods, where these deep concentrations of corporate power have left residents traveling further and further for groceries. 

STACY MITCHELL: 39 million Americans live in an area that’s classified as a food desert. There are food deserts all across the country. There are so many communities that have been hollowed out, where people are struggling on a day-to-day basis. Not having a grocery store nearby is a daily hardship and an indignity. 

JAYSON DE LEON: By Robert Bork’s standards, a food desert is actually in its own twisted way an efficient economic outcome. If large companies like Walmart drive out smaller, less efficient grocers and nobody chooses to serve that low income community, that’s not a market failure. It’s a market outcome. It’s just something that happens. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Lina Khan believes by favoring what Bork would call the most efficient grocers, consumers have been harmed in other ways. The geographic distribution of stores is a problem. The health outcomes of people living in food deserts is a problem. And in case you haven’t paid attention to our politics in the last four years, the price of groceries is still a problem, too. 

LINA KHAN: The attack line was Robinson-Patman enforcement results in higher prices for people. That was the argument that was offered. But once you try to trace that argument back to actual evidence or support, there’s no evidence. It’s really arguments that are made on theory. And they’re not actually supported by what’s happening in the real world. 

JAYSON DE LEON: In the real world, national chains have amassed so much power in some places that they’re actually able to inflate prices. We saw this play out during the pandemic. At the time, supply chain issues were driving prices up. And big chains used that as an opportunity to turn bigger profits. 

LINA KHAN: It was really striking to hear some of the executives from these big grocers talk on their earnings calls, where sometimes there was a recognition that, even though the costs were going to go down because those supply chain issues would resolve themselves, the grocers decided in some cases to keep prices high anyway. And that’s something that you can only get away with if you’re not being disciplined by competition. 

JAYSON DE LEON: The retirement of Robinson-Patman was supposed to drive prices down for consumers. But in an industry as consolidated as the grocery business, monopolistic power starts to act in monopolistic ways. And so when Lina Khan was appointed Chair of the FTC, she decided to do something bold. 

LINA KHAN: So, the FTC during my tenure ended up reviving the Robinson-Patman Act. 

JAYSON DE LEON: During her time at the FTC, Lina and her team pursued the first Robinson-Patman cases in over 20 years. One of those cases was against Pepsi, which by the way doesn’t just make soda. They’re also one of the biggest suppliers in the grocery sector. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Quaker Oats? Pepsi. Ocean Spray? Pepsi. Rold Gold Pretzels? Pepsi. It’s really just Pepsi all the way down. 

JAYSON DE LEON: The FTC’s case alleged that Pepsi was giving unfair price advantages to Walmart at the expense of competing retailers. So, should I explain waterbeds again? Okay, so if you sit on one side– Or I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

LINA KHAN: You know, I went and visited some of the independent grocers and independent wholesalers that said they were being discriminated against in this way. And what they would tell me is that if they went to a Costco or a Walmart or a Target, the prices on the shelves would be lower than what was being made available to them at a wholesale level, which is pretty staggering in terms of just the types of huge price differences that may be happening. 

JAYSON DE LEON: For too long, the FTC hasn’t been skeptical enough towards monopoly power. Bringing this case was just one way Lina Khan hoped to change that and, at the same time, show the public that the government can truly take on big problems. 

LINA KHAN: I think people had in some ways lost hope that the government would really go back to doing its job in this way. And so I heard a lot from people that–especially for grocers and other independent stores that had been feeling squeezed for a very long time–this was a sign of hope for them.

CHRIS BERUBE: In recent weeks, Trump’s FTC voted to drop the Pepsi case, calling it a legally dubious partisan stunt. Lina Khan says that lawsuit would have helped stop conduct that squeezes small businesses and dismissing it was a gift to giant retailers. The FTC is still technically pursuing one more Robinson-Patman case, but it’s hard to say what the future of that case looks like. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Regardless, Khan’s criticisms of Bork’s antitrust ideas have already started to make an impact. Last year, when the Kroger-Albertsons merger was blocked, courts cited evidence that this amount of consolidation would lead to more food deserts and higher prices. Khan also helped implement new federal merger guidelines, which the Trump administration kept. And that means any merger that crosses the government’s desk will have a much higher standard to meet–not just Robert Bork’s consumer welfare standard. 

[KITCHEN NOISES]

JEANNE MICHON: Yeah, they’re wrapping it up, yep. Henry is… How old are you? 84? 

JAYSON DE LEON: Back in Woonsocket, when I met up with Jeanne Michon, she was in her element: inside a kitchen. Jeanne actually runs an organization named New Beginnings. It’s a community kitchen that helps feed some of the city’s most food insecure. On a warm, sunny April day–the first of the year–she had 40 paper boxes laid out in a neat square to pack leftovers. 

JEANNE MICHON: I’ve been doing this 39 years. I don’t waste anything. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Jeanne has been around Woonsocket long enough to see a food desert emerge. And she decided to do something about it. The whole organization at New Beginnings has created a vital piece of infrastructure in the city. For a long time, kitchens like hers have helped feed people who don’t have the means. But over the years, she’s noticed more people drop in who simply can’t make it a grocery store. And to help serve these families, she’s planning to work even longer hours. 

JEANNE MICHON: Right now we just do lunch. So, if there’s working families who can’t get to food–they can’t get to lunch with us–we want to expand to do meals at night as well. So, we’ll reach one population during the day and one population at night. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Decades of neglect created Woonsocket’s food desert. Laws went unenforced, and corporate power ran amok. Recently, lawmakers in Rhode Island proposed a package of antitrust laws aimed directly at the grocery business, including a local version of a Robinson-Patman Act. But until something really changes, Jeanne is just gonna be here, in her kitchen, doing her best to serve the people this whole system left behind. 

CHRIS BERUBE: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Jayson De Leon, and edited by me, Chris Berube and the team at 99% Invisible. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. 

Special thanks this week to Stacy Mitchell over at the Institute for Local Self Reliance. She’s been writing about food deserts in The Atlantic and other publications for years. You can find links to some of those articles on our website.

Also special thanks this week to Ethan Shorey over at The Valley Breeze. There are not a lot of local publications covering places like Woonsocket at this point. And the archives of the Valley Breeze were tremendously helpful in the research for this story. So thank you.

An extra special thanks to Jeanne Michon and the whole New Beginnings organization. Their work out of Rhode Island is truly heroic.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, and Joe Rosenberg. 

And of course, Roman Mars is our fearless leader.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. 

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, temporarily headquartered this week between Providence, Rhode Island… and beautiful… downtown… Toronto, Ontario Canada.

You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our Discord server. There’s a lot going on there. You can find a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.