Eric Fruits on the FTC’s Challenge to Kroger/Albertsons Merger
ICLE Senior Scholar Eric Fruits was quoted by the The Oregonian about the Federal Trade Commission’s challenge of the proposed merger of Kroger and Albertsons. You can read the full piece here.
“The current FTC, philosophically and politically, is really opposed to big mergers in general,” said Eric Fruits, an antitrust researcher at the Portland-based nonprofit International Center for Law & Economics. “They dropped a lot of strong hints that they were opposed to it, so we kind of knew that we were going to end up where we are today.”
…“I think that Kroger and Albertsons believe that they need to do this deal because the food retail market has changed in such a way that it just can’t support competing against each other,” Fruits said. “They have so much more competitive pressure.”