Eric Fruits on the Kroger-Albertsons Trial
ICLE Senior Scholar Eric Fruits was quoted by Portland Business Journal about the start of the Federal Trade Commission’s challenge of the merger of Kroger and Albertsons. You can read the full piece here.
“A judge who lives in Portland is going to know how many Fred Meyers and QFCs and Safeways there are,” said Eric Fruits, who has assisted in the review of several large mergers and serves as president of Portland-based Economics International Corp. “It’s something you can’t really ignore.”
…How much weight the judge will give Local 555’s endorsement is anyone’s guess. What will likely factor heavily in Nelson’s decision is how the competitive grocery market is defined. The last court challenge to a major grocery chain merger occurred in 1988, when American Stores acquired Lucky, Fruits noted.
“That’s where the market definition we still use today was introduced, and a lot has changed since then,” Fruits said.
…Kroger and Albertsons have no legal obligation to ensure that C&S Wholesale can provide meaningful competition, he said. C&S is not nearly as well known as the other two, but if they’d tried to sell to a bigger chain, that could have also raised more antitrust concerns, Fruits said.
…No matter how it goes, one thing is clear – “There’s going to be a lot of tea leaf reading when the judge issues a decision,” Fruits said.
The two grocery giants have done “everything they can to make this deal go through,” including spinning off stores, he said.
“I think the odds are in favor of the merger going through, eventually,” he said.