784
FTC head wants investigation into grocery stores over inflated prices
(www.independent.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
784 points (99.7% liked)
News
23265 readers
3543 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Yes it does. Because they need ironclad proof if they're going to take legal action.
I love that we need ironclad proof to decide whether or not it's okay for people to be able to afford sustenance or not. If there's no proof then, oh well! The poors will just have to make do.
That's how legal cases work. You have to prove your side. I'm not sure how else they should work.
I'm aware that's how they work but when the system "works" and the result is starving families then maybe it's time we rethink whether we should keep following this system, no?
So how should it work? What system could not be abused by, for example, a Trump administration?
The problem is but just one system, but a set of interlocking bad systems. For instance, there would have been no Trump administration without the Electoral College and plurality voting. I didn't think any system can be made to work right when we allow bad people to be put in charge.
That doesn't really answer my question of how it should work.
Would you prefer the FTC just forces them to cut prices, and then give both the corporations reason to sue them, as well as more right-wing talking points about "big government stealing money from Ma and Pa grocer"? The unfortunate reality is that if the FTC don't do this investigation and come back with hard proof, no matter how blatantly obvious what the large grocers are doing actually is, they will play the victim and make it even harder to take any hard action against them.
The other reality is that, even if it's not actually the case, if it turned out that it was just "inflation" and all those companies did have to raise prices to stay afloat (again, not saying this is the case at all, just simply playing devil's advocate), the FTC would face an absolute shitstorm if they took action and it did actually do serious harm to grocers/the broader food supply chain. Again, not a "Oh no, profits were only up 20% YoY instead of 35% because of the FTC action" but a "We will literally be selling all our products at a severe loss and will be bankrupt in weeks". They have to understand exactly how much they're fucking people over to take action, because historically there have been plenty of times where a well-intentioned "Stop fucking people over" rule, has caused much greater consequences down the line.
It sucks and is disgusting that in such a wealthy nation that we have people going hungry at all, but at least they're attempting to finally do something about this specific issue, and hopefully will at least discourage shit like this in the future.