The Federal Trade Commission in March released a report saying that the three largest grocers “accelerated and distorted” food costs amid supply disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. It also said that prices — and profits — remain high for Kroger, Walmart and Amazon even after the supply kinks have straightened themselves out.
But the country’s trade watchdog didn’t say in its report what might be done about it. The agency this week might have given a hint.
But that’s unrelated to the findings of the “6(b)” report, which was started during the pandemic in November 2021. It found problems with consolidation in the grocery sector even without the Kroger-Albersons merger.
Asked if the FTC planned to do anything about those problems, an agency official speaking on background on Monday said, “The report outlines several areas where further scrutiny by the FTC and policymakers is warranted. The report doesn’t specifically spell out any enforcement actions to be taken as a result of the report, but the report will inform the FTC’s future work as the Commission reviews potentially anticompetitive mergers and conduct as it works to protect consumers.”
The report itself found several broad areas in which it said the three big grocers were using their size to suppress competition.
One had to do with the big boys’ use of “on time, in full,” or OTIF, contracts with their suppliers. Because they’re such huge customers, they’re able to get strict guarantees that they’ll have their orders completely and promptly fulfilled or the supplier has to pay a steep penalty.
The FTC report said that at the beginning of the pandemic, virtually no grocers were insisting that the terms of their OTIF contracts be met — an acknowledgement that supply-chain disruptions made it impossible. But as time wore on, some of the biggest grocers reimposed them with a vengeance, the report said.
“Even as the supply chain crisis brought on by the pandemic continued, some retailers reimposed or even heightened the standards for their OTIF policies later in 2020,” it said. “For example, Walmart tightened its OTIF requirements in September 2020, requiring suppliers to achieve 98 percent OTIF compliance to avoid fines of 3%.”
Imposition of the contracts had an anticompetitive effect because, in a time of scarcity, they directed limited supplies of some items to the biggest grocers while their smaller competitors went begging, the report said.
In addition, large grocers are able to use their heft to negotiate constant, relatively low prices from suppliers, a practice known as “everyday low pricing.” Meanwhile, their smaller competitors depend on producer promotions to offer certain items at temporarily low rates.
As the pandemic set in and producers were already struggling to fill orders, they had little incentive to voluntarily reduce prices. That created another mismatch between the biggest grocers and their smaller competitors, the FTC report said.
“Promotions designed to increase sales made little sense when those producers were unable to meet existing demand,” it said. “These changes affected retailers differently depending on their pricing model. Most notably, these trade promotions reflect a significant amount of money within the industry, and so the competitive impact of these differential effects (or of the promotions generally), may warrant further study.”
More broadly, food prices have jumped 25% over four years and they remain high even as supply problems related to covid have eased. Grocers have said their costs remain high, but according to the FTC report, food and beverage retailers saw their revenue rise to 6% over total costs in 2021 — higher than the previous peak of 5.6% in 2015. Then in the first three quarters of 2023, it went even higher — to 7% over costs.
It seems that might be an avenue of further inquiry.
“This profit trend casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs,” the report said. “Examining the cause or nature of rising industry profits is beyond the scope of this limited study into pandemic-related supply chain disruptions. However, the question warrants further inquiry by the Commission and policymakers.”
MARTY SCHLADEN
Marty Schladen has been a reporter for decades, working in Indiana, Texas and other places before returning to his native Ohio to work at The Columbus Dispatch in 2017. He’s won state and national journalism awards for investigations into utility regulation, public corruption, the environment, prescription drug spending and other matters.
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
Hamilton County, Ohio – Strategies to End Homelessness, which leads a coordinated community effort to end homelessness in Greater Cincinnati, today announced that it has received a $5 million grant from the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund—the largest private gift in the organization’s history. Launched in 2018 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the Day 1 Families Fund issues annual leadership awards to leading organizations on the frontlines that are employing compassionate, needle-moving work to help families move from unsheltered homelessness and shelters to permanent housing with the services they require to achieve stability.
“Our analysis of homelessness data identifies solutions that are needed. Unfortunately, we only have enough capacity to help about a third of the families that are in need, and other funding sources do not support some of the services homeless families need the most,” said Kevin Finn, president and CEO of Strategies to End Homelessness. “We are grateful to the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund for this impactful grant, which will both expand capacity in existing data-driven programs and also support new services that data indicates are desperately needed.”
This one-time grant will help Strategies to End Homelessness and its partners in their tireless work to support families as they reel from skyrocketing rent costs, limited services, and insufficient incomes. Strategies to End Homelessness plans to use the grant funds to prevent many children and families from ever experiencing the trauma of homelessness, to break the cycle of homelessness for others and to assist hundreds of at-risk families to progress toward self-sufficiency in safe, stable housing.
Strategies to End Homelessness was selected as a Day 1 Families Fund grant recipient by a group of national advisors who are leading advocates and experts on homelessness and service provision. National advisors brought expertise on housing justice, advancing racial equity, and helping programs employ resources effectively to assist families out of homelessness.
Over the past five years, the Day 1 Families Fund has provided 170 grants totaling more than $520 million to organizations around the country working to combat homelessness and help families gain housing support and stability.
About The Bezos Day 1 Fund
The Bezos Day 1 Fund made a $2 billion commitment to focus on making meaningful and lasting impacts in two areas: funding existing nonprofits that help families experiencing homelessness, and creating a network of new, nonprofit tier-one preschools in low-income communities. The Day 1 Families Fund issues annual leadership awards to organizations and civic groups doing compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families. The vision statement comes from the inspiring Mary’s Place in Seattle: no child sleeps outside. For more information, visit www.BezosDayOneFund.org/Day1FamiliesFund.
About Strategies to End Homelessness
Strategies to End Homelessness, a 501(c)(3), leads the coordinated community effort to end homelessness in Greater Cincinnati and envisions a community in which everyone has a stable home and the resources needed to maintain it. Through the coordination of the local homeless services system, administration of City, County, State, Federal and private funding to partner agencies, and the operation of programs, Strategies to End Homelessness prevents homelessness whenever possible, assists people out of homelessness, and offers solutions to homelessness through housing, serving approximately 11,000 people annually. For more information, go to https://www.strategiestoendhomelessness.org.
Clermont County, Ohio – On Tuesday, March 9 OhioMeansJobs of Clermont County will present its first Virtual Job Fair. This event is hosted by the BCW|Workforce, operated by the Workforce Investment Board of Butler, Clermont, and Warren Counties, along with OhioMeansJobs (OMJ) and REDI Cincinnati, (a JobsOhio Network Partner).
This virtual career fair will be offered at no cost to employers and job seekers and will focus on the manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics & distribution sectors. Participating employers and job seekers will be offered an immersive virtual career fair experience — all from the comfort of a computer or mobile device.
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There will be hundreds of jobs available in Clermont County from companies like Huhtamaki, HealthSource of Ohio, Cintas, Amazon, Home Instead Senior Care, Milacron, and more.
For more information, including an updated list of employers, contact Eric Plummer at OhioMeansJobs at eric.plummer@jfs.ohio.gov.
The next Virtual Job Fair currently is scheduled for May 4, 2021.
“Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and survived the turkey coma! We are now full swing into the holiday season and the Holiday Giving Shop is rapidly approaching. We have wish lists on Amazon to have things shipped directly to us or, of course, you can do your own choices if you’d prefer and drop to us during open pantry hours.
Here is a LINK where you can go directly to Amazon and buy one of the many gifts they suggest.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now post, an article written for the Mongabay news website states that a new, ambitious conservation project for the Amazon Rainforest is on its way! Read here the article written by Shanna Hanbury.
The Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA), an ambitious cooperative project to bring together the existing scientific research on the Amazon biome, has been launched with the support of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
Modeled on the authoritative UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the first Amazon report is planned for release in April 2021; that report will include an extensive section on Amazon conservation solutions and policy suggestions backed up by research findings.
The Science Panel for the Amazon consists of 150 experts — including climate, ecological, and social scientists; economists; indigenous leaders and political strategists — primarily from the Amazon countries
According to Carlos Nobre, one of the leading scientists on the project, the SPA’s reports will aim not only to curb deforestation, but to propose an ongoing economically feasible program to conserve the forest while advancing human development goals for the region, working in tandem with, and in support of, ecological systems.
Now, a group of 150 leading scientific and economic experts on the Amazon basin have taken it upon themselves to launch an ambitious conservation project. The newly founded Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA) aims to consolidate scientific research on the Amazon and propose solutions that will secure the region’s future — including the social and economic well-being of its thirty-five-million inhabitants.
“Never before has there been such a rigorous scientific evaluation on the Amazon,” said Carlos Nobre, the leading Amazon climatologist and one of the chairs of the Scientific Panel. The newly organized SPA, he adds, will model its work on the style of the authoritative reports produced by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in terms of academic diligence and the depth and breadth of analysis and recommendations.
The Amazon Panel, is funded by the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network and supported by prominent political leaders, such as former Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos and the elected leader of the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin, José Gregorio Díaz Mirabal. The SPA plans to publish its first report by April 2021.
Timber illegally logged within an indigenous reserve seized by IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, before the election of Jair Bolsonaro. Under the Bolsonaro administration, IBAMA has been largely defunded. Image courtesy of IBAMA.
Reversing the Amazon Tipping Point
Over the last five decades, the Amazon rainforest lost almost a fifth of its forest cover, putting the biome on the edge of a dangerous cliff. Studies show that if 3 to 8% more forest cover is lost, then deforestation combined with escalating climate change is likely to cause the Amazon ecosystem to collapse.
After this point is reached, the lush, biodiverse rainforest will receive too little precipitation to maintain itself and quickly shift from forest into a degraded savanna, causing enormous economic damage across the South American continent, and releasing vast amounts of forest-stored carbon to the atmosphere, further destabilizing the global climate.
Amazon researchers are now taking a proactive stance to prevent the Amazon Tipping Point: “Our message to political leaders is that there is no time to waste,” Nobre wrote in the SPA’s press release.
Amid escalating forest loss in the Amazon, propelled by the anti-environmentalist agenda of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, experts fear that this year’s burning season, already underway, may exceed the August 2019 wildfires that shocked the world. Most Amazon basin fires are not natural in cause, but intentionally set, often by land grabbers invading indigenous territories and other conserved lands, and causing massive deforestation.
“We are burning our own money, resources and biodiversity — it makes no sense,” Sandra Hacon told Mongabay; she is a prominent biologist at the Brazilian biomedical Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and has studied the effects of Amazon forest fires on health. It is expected that air pollution caused by this year’s wildfire’s, when combined with COVID-19 symptoms, will cause severe respiratory impacts across the region.
Bolivian ecologist Marielos Penã-Claros, notes the far-reaching economic importance of the rainforest: “The deforestation of the Amazon also has a negative effect on the agricultural production of Uruguay or Paraguay, thousands of kilometers away.”
The climate tipping point, should it be passed, would negatively effect every major stakeholder in the Amazon, likely wrecking the agribusiness and energy production sectors — ironically, the sectors responsible for much of the devastation today.
“I hope to show evidence to the world of what is happening with land use in the Amazon and alert other governments, as well as state and municipal-level leadership. We have a big challenge ahead, but it’s completely necessary,” said Hacon.
Creating a workable blueprint for the sustainable future of the Amazon rainforest is no simple task. The solutions mapped out, according to the Amazon Panel’s scientists, will seek to not only prevent deforestation and curb global climate change, but to generate a new vision and action plan for the Amazon region and its residents — especially, fulfilling development goals via a sustainable standing-forest economy.
The SPA, Nobre says, will make a critical break with the purely technical approach of the United Nation’s IPCC, which banned policy prescriptions entirely from its reports. In practice, this has meant that while contributing scientists can show the impacts of fossil fuels on the atmosphere, they cannot recommend ending oil subsidies, for example. “We inverted this logic, and the third part of the [SPA] report will be entirely dedicated to searching for policy suggestions,” Nobre says. “We need the forest on its feet, the empowerment of the traditional peoples and solutions on how to reach development goals.”
Researchers across many academic fields (ranging from climate science and economics to history and meteorology) are collaborating on the SPA Panel, raising hopes that scientific consensus on the Amazon rainforest can be reached, and that conditions for research cooperation will greatly improve.
Indigenous Munduruku dancers in the Brazilian Amazon. The SPA intends to gather Amazon science and formulate socio-economic solutions in order to make sound recommendations to policymakers. Image by Mauricio Torres / Mongabay.
SPA participants hope that a thorough scientific analysis of the rainforest’s past, present and future will aid in the formulation of viable public policies designed to preserve the Amazon biome — hopefully leading to scientifically and economically informed political decisions by the governments of Amazonian nations.
“We are analyzing not only climate but biodiversity, human aspects and preservation beyond the climate issues,” Paulo Artaxo, an atmospheric physicist at the University of São Paulo, told Mongabay.
Due to the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic, the initiative’s initial dates for a final report were pushed forward by several months, and a conference in China cancelled entirely. But the 150-strong team is vigorously pushing forward, and the first phase of the project — not publicly available — is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
The hope on the horizon is that a unified voice from the scientific community will trigger long-lasting positive changes in the Amazon rainforest. “More than ever, we need to hear the voices of the scientists to enable us to understand how to save the Amazon from wanton and unthinking destruction,” said Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, on the official launch website called The Amazon We Want.
Banner image: Aerial photo of an Amazon tributary surrounded by rainforest. Image by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay.
Loveland, Ohio – Have you happened to see a gigantic swan floating down the Little Miami River? Well, I am here to tell you that it wasn’t just your imagination! On Saturday afternoon Symmes Township Resident, Nick Dyson, shared with us some photos that showed himself and his family and friends floating down the Little Miami in a huge inflatable swan. Dyson shared his “swan story” with us so that those who frequent the State and National Wild and Scenic, the Little Miami River, and our famous Loveland Bike Trail would be sure to look out for the swan all the way from the Amazon!
“My friend Brian Rogers is the director of student ministries at Northstar Community Church, and he initially bought the swan on Amazon to use with his students and volunteer leaders in the retention pond that was going to be made with all of the construction going on at Northstar/The Care Center,” Dyson explained, “However, in the final renovation there ended up not being a retention pond at all, so he took the swan out for its inaugural float about a month ago on the Little Miami with all of his volunteer youth leaders. He then busted it out a second time to use this past Saturday the 25th with both of our families, including their exchange student from China. We put the swan in the river at the Monkey Bar in Foster and got out about 2-1/2 miles downstream at the Deerfield Township river access on Shore Drive. There are only a few spots on the river where the river access is wide enough to put the Swan in the water because it is so huge,” Dyson said.
Dyson provided us with some incredible photos of the “swan-filled” afternoon so that we could share the story and photos with the Loveland community! We want to thank you Nick for sharing your story and some really fun photos with us! Check out Dyson’s photos below!
We believe we always have some important news to share with you about our community.
And sometimes like today – this very fun and Lovelandesque photo that really depicts our resort town – the Staycation Resort of Southwest Ohio.
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Business news is boring. Let’s make it interesting, fun, and understandable. New episodes are up every Tuesday and Thursday!
New Full of Cents podcast is up! David English and Rick Mulvey talk Paul Manafort’s mortgage fraud, FC Cincinnati’s awful awful streaming deal, and more.
Full of Cents is now a regular feature in Loveland Magazine.
Each podcast is owned and operated by the Podcast creators (Podcasters). Loveland Magazine is not responsible or to be held accountable for the information listed or the content of the podcasts. The opinions expressed are solely those of the Podcasters and do not necessarily the views or opinions of Loveland Magazine.
Workforce Investment Board of Butler, Clermont and Warren Counties, along with the OhioMeansJobs centers of Butler, Warren and Clermont counties have joined together to host the Southwest Ohio Job Fair on November 17, 2017 from 11 AM to 2 PM at the Great Wolf Lodge Conference Center located at 2501 Great Wolf Drive Mason, Ohio 45040.
Over 100 employers will be in attendance, many of which will be offering on-the-spot interviews.
Mason, Ohio – The Southwest Ohio Job Fair will take place this Friday, November 17 from 11 AM to 2 PM at the Great Wolf Lodge in Mason. One hundred employers will be attending representing businesses such as: Graphel, GE Aviation, Amazon, Amstan Logstics, Mercy Health, ThyssenKrupp Bilstein, Miami Valley Gaming, Alfons Haar, Miami Valley Gaming and many more. Thousands of career opportunities are available in Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, Hospitality, Transportation, Logistics, Customer Service, Administrative, and Management for all skill levels, age ranges and experience levels.
The Southwest Ohio Job Fair will be distinguishing those who have served in our military forces by providing exclusive identification cards at the door.The cards will recognize local heroes that have sacrificed for our freedoms. Butler, Clermont and Warren County employers value the unique skills and considerable talent that veterans bring to their businesses.
This is a great opportunity to begin a new career. Many employers will be conducting on-the-spot interviews for skill levels ranging from entry level to management.The event is open to the public with free parking. Registration is required at the door.
Business news is boring. Let’s make it interesting, fun, and understandable. New episodes are up every Tuesday and Thursday!
For more information visit 