The supermarket supermerger heads to court
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2024
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The trial weighing the merger of Kroger and Albertsons, two grocery titans, begins today. We’ll explain what the biggest supermarket merger in U.S. history could mean for everyday shoppers and why the federal government wants to put a stop to it. Plus, we’ll get into the latest of Boeing’s woes: its Starliner spacecraft. Can the company’s failures teach us something about the business of spaceflight? And, SpaceX is ready to launch a mission for the first-ever commercial spacewalk.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “What Kroger-Albertsons merger trial with FTC means for your grocery store” from The Washington Post
- “New Boeing CEO Faces Hard Choices After NASA Snubs Starliner for SpaceX” from Bloomberg
- “Flight attendants speak out about low pay, debt and homelessness” from The Washington Post
- “IUD insertion pain is complicated. Doctors say the new CDC guidelines are only a start.” from NBC News
- “Here’s What the CDC’s New IUD Pain Management Recommendations Mean in Practice” from Self
- “SpaceX to Launch Billionaire on First-Ever Private Spacewalk” from Bloomberg
We love to hear from you. Email your comments and questions to makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today make sense. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm Ky Rizdall Monday, August 26th. We will do what we usually do. |
| 0:16.7 | News and some smiles starting with the news. Mr. Rizdahl please go. |
| 0:21.2 | So, um, two, well. is |
| 0:25.0 | the news item and then why it matters. |
| 0:27.0 | So the news item is that the big Kroger's and or maybe it's just Kroger I don't know |
| 0:32.0 | Kroger and don't know Kroger and Albertson's merger trial |
| 0:35.1 | gets going today in federal district court in Portland Oregon it's a 25 |
| 0:39.2 | billion dollar deal it'd be the biggest supermarket merger in the history of this economy. |
| 0:44.7 | The Federal Trade Commission is opposed. The two companies say, look, man, we need to get bigger |
| 0:48.9 | because Walmart and Amazon and everybody else are bigger than we are and they sell a lot of groceries |
| 0:55.0 | and so we have to compete. |
| 0:57.0 | So that's the news item and you should keep up speed on that because |
| 1:00.0 | groceries and we all need food. |
| 1:02.0 | The reason this matters though is that this is the main point |
| 1:08.0 | of accuracy shall we say in the policy that Vice President Harris rolled out a couple of weeks ago when she promised to try to bring down food and grocery prices, right? |
| 1:17.0 | It's the consolidation in the market that is the most impactful thing that has been happening. |
| 1:22.0 | As we said on the show that... is the most impactful thing that has been happening. |
| 1:23.8 | As we said on the show that time we talked about it, you know, |
| 1:26.7 | grocery profit margins, and I think this is from 2023, it's out of Johns Hopkins, we're 1.8%, which is not a lot. But it's the |
| 1:36.2 | consolidation that leads to fewer choices, more pricing power for the companies, all |
| 1:41.0 | of those things, that's really what's at issue in this case |
... |
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