A wave of corporate consolidation is reshaping the grocery industry, squeezing workers, limiting competition, and giving a handful of retailers unprecedented control over what Americans pay for food.
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If it feels to you like American consumers have fewer choices than ever before, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. Federal regulators are approving corporate mega-mergers at the fastest rate since the 1980s. Consumers are feeling those industry-spanning consolidations everywhere, as hardly a sector of American life has escaped Wall Street’s goal of building the largest and most powerful corporate conglomerates in world history.
From power utilities and artificial intelligence to broadcast news networks and railroads, a few massive corporate players have come to dominate American commercial life in ways not seen since the Gilded Age trusts of the 19th century. Those consolidations have generated historic profits for executives and major shareholders while working families are faced with lower quality goods and services, fewer options, and a hostile labor market unfairly skewed toward the interests of the ultra-rich.
Democrats have been quick to criticize some of the nation’s biggest mergers as anti-worker and anti-consumer, but one critical sector of the U.S. economy has managed to escape widespread public criticism: grocery stores. Thanks to a record rise in special interest cash donations to both Democrats and Republicans, grocery-industry lobby groups have managed to keep prices high, wages low, and consumer choice limited while avoiding federal policymakers’ crosshairs. The result is an invisible crisis in the nation’s food industry that threatens to reshape how and what Americans eat.
In a corporate landscape defined by Republican deregulation, America’s grocery stores and food suppliers are consolidating despite active federal laws explicitly intended to prevent anticompetitive behavior. Perhaps the most important of those laws is the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, or RPA, also known as the Anti-Price Discrimination Act. For decades, RPA ensured fair competition by banning food suppliers from charging different prices to different stores; at least it did until the Reagan-era Federal Trade Commission largely stopped enforcing it in the 1980s. Even though RPA is still the law of the land, food suppliers like Pepsi now routinely ignore the law without consequence.
“Big corporations have buying power, and they can oppress and dictate to producers what they want to pay for crops,” Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos told me. “A corporation can come to a farmer and say ‘we’ll pay you this price for potatoes, but you can’t give that price to anyone else,’ so they fix prices in a way that hurts independent supermarkets and independent businesses.”
Megacorporations aren’t subtle about flexing their market power to fix prices in ways that protect other megacorporations. Last year President Donald Trump’s FTC dismissed an RPA claim against PepsiCo which alleged that Pepsi illegally offered grocery chain Walmart unfair pricing discounts while charging smaller chains more for the same products. When independent grocery stores undercut Walmart by lowering the price of Pepsi products, PepsiCo allegedly responded by raising wholesale prices or refusing to do business with the smaller stores until they raised prices above those at Walmart.
The Invisible Worker
As independent grocery stores struggle, they become more likely to sell out to larger national chains, leading to consolidation that makes both prices and employee wages less competitive. As president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 3000, Faye Guenther represents over 50,000 grocery and retail workers across the Pacific Northwest. Guenther has spent years fighting the growing imbalance between rising prices and falling wages. Now, she says, things have reached a crisis point for regular Americans.
“Grocery store workers work around food all day long and can barely afford to buy the food in their own stores,” Guenther says. “They were called heroes and essential workers during the pandemic, and some of them got $2 an hour wage increases, but those were later scraped back. And we know from the data that inflation has hurt low-wage workers the most, because even lower-cost store brands are increasing in price.”
At the same time, grocery store consolidation has sharply reduced the number of entry-level jobs that once served as young Americans’ first experiences with employment. American teens are now facing the worst summer job market in nearly a century, but that’s just one part of a long-term trend. Retail jobs as a whole have fallen over 25 percent since 2010, with a disproportionate number of those losses at grocery stores. As grocery megachains transition increasingly to self-scanning and AI tools, employee wages and benefits have also collapsed despite an increased cost of living.
“Workers are working and not getting what they need to survive,” Guenther warns. “About 12 percent of our grocery store workers are unhoused. Many more are rent-burdened. That’s not good for our society and it’s not good for our communities. Mass consolidation is just crushing those workers and it’s getting worse.”
As grocery stores merge into ever-larger conglomerates, they exert even more power on food suppliers to sign lopsided deals that lower buying costs while raising sale prices. The results have been undeniable: while the grocery sector as a whole has averaged roughly 2 percent revenue growth annually, massive chains like Walmart are growing nearly three times as fast. As major conglomerates pour their additional revenue into acquiring smaller stores, consumers in cities often find themselves in communities with just a single grocery store. That’s the case in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a city of 45,000 people that now offers just a single grocery store.
“Three out of five people in Woonsocket don’t own their own transportation, and now companies are using legal tactics like restrictive covenants to build a monopoly in front of our eyes,” Matos says. “There are empty buildings in the community that could be used as grocery stores but the deeds prevent it, so there’s no competition at all.”
When Matos condemns ‘restrictive covenants’, she’s referring to the process by which large companies have manipulated state laws in order to artificially restrict what commercial properties can be used for within communities. By limiting the number of grocery stores within, say, a 20 mile radius of an existing store, restrictive covenants have become the leading driver of food deserts—urban areas more than a mile from a grocery store, or rural areas without a store within 10 miles. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, over 18.8 million Americans, or 6.1 percent of the country, live in food deserts.
Unbreaking the System
The balance of power has never been skewed so heavily against grocery store workers and consumers, and the rush of food industry mergers has only worsened an unsustainable situation. Grocery chains spent over $10 million lobbying the Trump administration in 2025. When grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons sought Trump’s approval for a merger that would have created a nationwide grocery titan, those two companies alone poured over $4 million into lobbying Democrats and Republicans alike. For Guenther, it’s no surprise that so much spending bought the silence of key national Democrats.
“Whether they’re Democrat or Republican, they are representing big interests, big business interests, and not everyday worker, everyday consumer interests,” Guenther says. “Who are voters supposed to vote for? It’s been both parties that have failed to take action. The system has been corrupted.”
“My concern is that it feels that in this country we’re coming to a point in which we think about capitalism as being the same as monopoly, and it shouldn’t,” Matos added. “Democrats… need to champion how our party is the one that protects consumers, protects individuals, protects the workers, protects the little people, because the big corporations already have their own protections.”
Matos and Guenther agree on one obvious pro-consumer and pro-worker solution: passing the Protecting the Right To Organize (PRO) Act, a bundle of reforms that would strengthen labor rights and toughen up regulations on all manner of mega-mergers. But even though Democrats have positioned themselves as the pro-labor party, President Joe Biden failed to bring the PRO Act to a vote during his presidency. It now faces an uncertain future under a Trump administration that believes in protecting friendly corporations by limiting competition.
“If anybody cares about protecting the future of democracy and making sure that we share power in a way that’s good for workers, consumers, and businesses, including small businesses, people need to focus on making sure Democrats actually enact pro-labor policies,” Guenther says. “Otherwise we’re just going to keep repeating this same cycle.”
Matos also believes states need to move decisively to fill gaps where the federal government is failing to act on labor rights. She introduced a package of bills in Rhode Island to end restrictive covenants and enforce RPA at the state level “because right now we cannot trust that the federal government is going to.” Matos noted that Rhode Island is also the first state to limit the use of self-checkout stations, a campaign they worked on in collaboration with the state’s UFCW leadership. Under that legislation, all grocery stores must have one human-staffed checkout lane for every three self-checkout kiosks.
As grocery workers struggle against ever more powerful multinational mergers, Guenther hopes Democrats will spend the next two years making clear to voters that rising prices at the checkout line and stagnant wages are fundamental issues for both the party and American democracy. For a Democratic Party that has become alienated from its labor roots, the link between thriving workers and a thriving democracy is now the most important story that the growing field of 2028 presidential hopefuls can tell.
“We have to have a big marker, a bright line between workers having the power to organize in their workplaces and take on their employer and us having a thriving democracy,” Guenther says. “That approach is the only thing that is truly a counterbalance to total corporate domination of our democracy.”