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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices
twoodfin wrote 37 min ago:
The Robinson-Patman Act is terrible law. Itâs been routinely violated
(unknowingly in most cases) for decades across effectively every sector
of the economy & enforced vanishingly rarely.
If it were to be enforced uniformly and aggressively it would be
devastating: Every negotiation between a supplier and a purchaser at
every level is potentially a federal crime!
If it were to be enforced capriciously, it would put unchecked power
over everyday commerceâagain at every levelâinto the hands of the
FTC and its political masters.
No thanks. Repeal it so we can stop hearing about this âone neat
trick to roll back neoliberalism!â
dominicrose wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
As if we needed another reason not to buy junk food.
By the way, in France we have a 5.5% VAT on food, instead of 20% for
other products. Junk food is also 5.5% but cat food is 20%.
I wonder if this is going to change some day for junk food or sodas.
hasbot wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
Where are the mainstream media stories about this? The article
mentioned the story blowing up but a Google search showed only one
media outlet covering the story.
kotaKat wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
Oh! I've witnessed this quietly every time I buy soda!
I'm a habitual enough soda drinker that I'm a six-pack-a-day diet soda
drinker (don't judge me, at least it's not Red Bull). I notice that
there's vendor collusion at Walmart for months at a time where the
Pepsi six-packs will typically go on sale for a few months at a sub-$4
to $5 price (currently it's $4.98) while Coke packs will be $5-6 off
sale.
Cycle three to four months and Coke will enter the $4 position and
Pepsi goes back up to a full retail price for the next quarter.
I've always seen the 'cycle' of the two competitors constantly hitting
a 'sale' price across various retailers.
antonymoose wrote 45 min ago:
Seems to be a pattern among all products Iâve ever encountered.
Iâm a heavy sales shopper. My local grocer (Ingles) will do a promo
for Sargento cheese or Chobani yoghurt for instance, normal price of
5$ letâs say, then drop it to $2 for a week, then to $4 the next
week, then back to full price. This rinses and repeats every 2 or 3
months for most sales products.
Sadly for this RedBull drinker, they never go on sale, at all, ever,
anywhere.
jimt1234 wrote 9 hours 31 min ago:
> A Trump official tasked with dealing with affordability tried to
hide this complaint...
First, that made me raise an eyebrow.
> ...and failed.
Then, that made me laugh.
> And now thereâs a political and legal storm as a result.
Finally, that made me sigh, because nothing's gonna happen. The "storm"
will pass, as it always does.
scentoni wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
The greatest enemy of a free market is a successful capitalist.
therobots927 wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
Shout out to Friedman, Hayek, Rand, Reagan, and their neoliberal
enablers in the democrat party like Clinton. All US Citizens and the
unlucky citizens of our colonies are property of US corporations.
Bought and paid for. Itâs about to become really obvious to anyone
paying even the smallest amount of attention just how screwed anyone
not in the top 1-5% really is.
lanfeust6 wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
> "The specifics in the complaint are that Pepsi keeps wholesale prices
on its products high for every outlet but Walmart, and Walmart in
return offers prominent placement in stores for Pepsi products. "
Lol so it's a price-cut. They offer Pepsi at lower margins, in a store
known for lower prices, in exchange for being boosted. And somehow this
translates to a conspiracy to raise prices everywhere else.
This is pathetic.
digital-cygnet wrote 12 hours 51 min ago:
It's not the discounting that's a problem -- it's the intentionally
watching other stores and preventing them from closing the "price
gap" with Walmart
> As a result of Food Lion threatening Walmartâs price gap, Pepsi
created a plan to nudge Food Lionâs retail prices on Pepsi products
upward by reducing promotional payments and allowances to Food Lion
and raising other costs for Food Lion
lanfeust6 wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
> It's not the discounting that's a problem -- it's the
intentionally watching other stores and preventing them from
closing the "price gap" with Walmart
This is circular. You are just describing a selective/privileged
discount, again.
Food Lion could of course sell some items at a loss (Walmart did
this, to gain market share and beat out smaller businesses). Costco
continues to sell hot dogs at a loss. But that probably wouldn't
work for Pepsi products in this context; fortunately, there are
other products beyond Pepsi.
lokar wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
The article explains that for a supermarket Pepsi is a must have
product, they loose to many customers if they donât have it.
Only one company sells it (obviously). Pepsi is enforcing a
retail price differential between Walmart and other retailers.
This is a violation of US law
lanfeust6 wrote 29 min ago:
> they loose to many customers if they donât have it.
Good thing they do have it, at a marginally higher price.
> This is a violation of US law
It may very well be, but that is not what I contended.
digital-cygnet wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
The bright line distinction is Pepsi watching Food Lion's
end-consumer pricing and trying to force it up in order to
mollify Walmart.
I actually doubt this is remarkable in the world of major
producers and retailers (e.g. I've heard anecdotes of brands
sending around reps to ensure that their shelves at retail stores
are appropriately well lit and placed, so having an agreement on
price seems pretty normal). However, it's probably a good case
to get the public thinking about the desireability of such an
oligopoly -- evidence that it's not merely better economies of
scale and logistics that are keeping Walmart's prices low, but
also explicit, private deals that feel shadier. I don't know
that anyone did anything objectionable here given the norms and
incentives in front of them, but it's a bad look for those norms
and incentives.
foolswisdom wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
You asked how a price cut translates to raising prices
everywhere, and the parent comment answered. Though even without
the further raising of prices for the competitors, the effect of
many such agreements is that the competitors have a harder time
competing, some shut down, and now the Walmart can also charge
more because there's less competition.
lanfeust6 wrote 30 min ago:
> the parent comment answered
There's no evidence that it translates to raised prices
everywhere.
> competitors have a harder time competing
Yes
> some shut down
No one is shutting down because of Pepsi. Offer some evidence.
theLegionWithin wrote 14 hours 33 min ago:
soda isn't actually food, nor is it healthy. Pepsi should be $40 a
carton
nitwit005 wrote 14 hours 4 min ago:
You should look up what PepsiCo owns.
lanfeust6 wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
Garbage, mostly. Aside from bottled water which is itself often
redundant, there's very little they sell that could be considered
"good" for people.
venturecruelty wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
That makes collusion okay. QED.
lanfeust6 wrote 7 min ago:
No.
agentifysh wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
Time for a class action lawsuit. You can submit your personal
information to a wordpress powered law firm's upload forms in exchange
for your twenty bucks without inflation compensation in about 5 years
and they collect a cool 50% fee distributed amongst millionaire
lawyers.
xrd wrote 13 hours 45 min ago:
I wish I could do the reverse. Could I and a million other people pay
$20 now to a few law firms that could fight this without need for
compensation and do everything to expose this to everyone in America?
frumenty wrote 13 hours 9 min ago:
A similar idea that's immediately actionable is subscribing to
independent media doing investigative journalism
gruez wrote 13 hours 11 min ago:
Isn't that what organizations like the ACLU are for? Except ACLU
fights for civil rights whereas your hypothetical organization
fights for consumer rights. The reason why it doesn't exist is that
it suffers heavily from the free rider problem. Any individual's
donation of $20 or whatever is unlikely to get them $20 worth of
returns, because the lawsuit is either funded or not. Moreover
you'd benefit regardless of whether you donated or not, so there's
no incentive to donate.
citizenkeen wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
But isnât that true of the ACLU as well?
agentifysh wrote 13 hours 13 min ago:
hmmm that is very interesting wonder if its possible even
hackthemack wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
Something is seriously wrong with the US justice system. Some links
to bolster your point. [1]
HTML [1]: https://waldenconsultants.com/2020/04/13/yet-another-study-s...
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
yndoendo wrote 15 hours 34 min ago:
Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing
price from producers and the cost for consumers. This is not just in
the food industry it is also in retail such as Amazon.
Companies like Kroger are so big they dictate the purchase prices from
farms. The farmers were better off in the past with multiple
competitors creating a bidding war. Same with consumers, products had
to be priced right to win their business.
A company I work for had to give free engineering labor in millions of
dollars to get access to one of the largest retailers in the USA. Too
big not-to-do-business-with harms everyone except the retailer.
smallmancontrov wrote 13 hours 46 min ago:
But Robert Bork and the Chicago School of Economics and Ronald Reagan
and the Republican Party assured me that mergers and trusts were good
for me! Look, the companies even have self-serving rationalizations
scribbled with crayons on butcher paper saying the same thing!
Seriously, though: I cannot believe how high and how far these
utterly dogshit arguments flew without pushback and the amount of
damage that consolidation has done to the American Experiment. The
best time to get a Lina Khan in the FTC was 40 years ago but the
second best time was 4 years ago. I just hope the next president
picks up the project... though I'm sure the (by then) trillionaires
will do everything in their power to stop that from happening.
_bohm wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
Not to mention the number of ordinary people who still parrot the
utter dogshit arguments to this day despite being actively harmed
by them
autoexec wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
> Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the
purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers.
That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to
give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order
to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. The US
just stopped enforcing the law (and also anti-trust laws that would
have protected local/small businesses) so here we are. At any point
the US could decide that enough is enough and fix the situation but
we'd probably have to make it actually illegal for corporations to
bribe government officials before it stands a chance of happening.
coldtea wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
>The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential
treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what
we're seeing with walmart and amazon today.
Price collusion is illegal too, but happens all the time. There
being a law for it just makes the rare fine a cost of doing
business.
dismantlethesun wrote 24 min ago:
Corporate punishments can be applied on a fine grain. Every
store, every instance, every choice becoming a 10k fine can
rapidly make even relatively rare acts untenable as a cost of
doing business.
potatototoo99 wrote 4 hours 40 min ago:
Not if the penalty is severe enough. Mass murder is also illegal
and we make sure we don't have repeat offenders.
re-thc wrote 10 hours 3 min ago:
> That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal
"Legality" has never stopped big companies from doing these things.
Google, Apple, Meta, etc has been receiving fines all day long and
they still continue what they do.
JoeAltmaier wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company, fined a
thousand bucks for every native rock drawing they destroy? They
counted them up, paid the fine, and blasted a road through. All
gone.
Fines becomes a business calculation. Not a deterrent, not if it
matters to the big corporation. Which at some scale, it will
become cost-effective.
mlhpdx wrote 9 hours 41 min ago:
I imagine a world sometimes where punitive measures reflect the
scope of crimes. If steal from a person is 1 year, then stealing
from 1000 is 10 years and from a million is a lifetime. Thatâd
put the end to political shenanigans, in my imagination.
eftychis wrote 14 hours 20 min ago:
It used to be illegal to bribe. Used to... Make a law impossible to
enforce, and you suddenly transform the act to a totally legal one,
at the expense of people losing trust in the system (specifically
the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress). And at some point, the system
breaks.
GenerWork wrote 15 hours 38 min ago:
>âI actually think weâre capable of taking whatever pricing we
need,â said CFO Hugh Johnston in 2022. And the company did just that,
raising prices by double digit percentages for seven straight quarters
in 2022-2023.
I hate to say it, but was he proven wrong? People are still buying junk
food and soda (their primary products) despite prices going up. Looking
at Pepsis profit margin, it seems to have hovered between 9.5% and
10.5% since 2021.
janalsncm wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
The point of the complaint is that they were able to do this due to
illegal collusion.
And even if people buy a lot of junk food, they might have bought
competitorsâ junk food. Laws are still laws even if you donât
like the people the laws protect.
naijaboiler wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
Exactly pricing discrimination (i.e. selling at different prices to
different customers) is absolutely legal and is market efficient in
a market with multiple sellers and multiple buyers.
Pricing discrimination combined with monopsony(single large buyer)
or monopoly ( single large seller) powers is not market efficient.
It leads to higher prices by end consumers. Price discrimination
via collusion + Walmarts monopsony in grocery industry violates
that 1930s act and is illegal
itsdrewmiller wrote 10 hours 30 min ago:
Is that the point? The illegal collusion was with walmart to keep
their prices artificially low compared to everyone else. They
weren't colluding with coke to raise all soda prices.
JKCalhoun wrote 15 hours 51 min ago:
"A Trump official tasked with dealing with affordability tried to hide
this complaintâ¦"
Why? Unless there was some kind of payola, this is doesn't make sense.
hasbot wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
This reality doesn't fit the narrative Trump pushes that all price
increases are Biden's fault.
anigbrowl wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
Game recognize game
xrd wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
American monopolists don't want to get on Trump's bad side, so they
give him fake peace prizes and gold trophies.
Trump's people don't want to get on the bad side of monopolists
because people like Elon Musk and Munger's son won't dump hundreds of
millions of dollars into keeping them in office (and out of jail).
Notice how I didn't mention you or me in either of those two
agreements. That's because we aren't even noticed.
It makes perfect sense if you understand for whom Trump's people are
working. It isn't much different than the democrats, but we should
note that Lina Khan was appointed by Biden. And, Matt Stoller has
another great article about attempts by Biden to correct the
financial system with nominations like Omarova. Republicans couldn't
get past calling her communist which is patently ridiculous. Drain
the swamp indeed, MAGA.
nitwit005 wrote 13 hours 52 min ago:
There often is a payment in the form of campaign contributions, and
mysteriously cushy jobs after retirement from politics.
But, beyond that, while logically voters should vote against
politicians that favor businesses over them, they often appear to do
the opposite. They simply gain the label of "business friendly".
janalsncm wrote 15 hours 22 min ago:
According to TFA, Pepsi hired lobbyists immediately prior to the
complaint being hidden.
WolfeReader wrote 15 hours 29 min ago:
Capitalism as it is taught: lots of companies competing with each
other, resulting in better goods at affordable prices! The customer
wins!
Capitalism in practice: a relative handful of rich people cooperating
with each other to extract as much money as possible from the middle
and lower classes.
You can see which version of capitalism this document supports.
The "fiscally conservative" aspect of the Republican party (and the
Democratic party to a lesser degree) don't want people to think of
capitalism-in-practice; they want happy consumers who think that
competition is still a thing. Since this document clearly goes
against that narrative, it must be suppressed.
zdragnar wrote 12 hours 54 min ago:
Ah yes, only capitalism suffers from corruption.
lanfeust6 wrote 13 hours 5 min ago:
"Capitalism is when Walmart offers a discount on Pepsi, at
razor-thin margins, and somehow this is maximally extracting from
the middle and lower classes"
Pepsi is exchanging profit for market-share. Be serious. Everyone
else is just charging the standard price.
Market failures ought to be accounted for with regulation (they
often are, that's what Liberalism is for), but this is not one.
The unessential garbage fuelling our obesity crisis has no place in
the conversation about the affordability crisis whilst
policy-makers and armchair experts are mulling a sugar tax, which
would just raise the price. Notwithstanding, profit margins at
grocery stores are not large in the first place. The reason profits
are breaking records is that population is also breaking records,
and customers are spending more on boutique animal alternative or
organic boxed products. Margins on produce are as thin as ever.
Canned black beans and soup are not making their billions.
DangitBobby wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
Did you forget about the "creative" methods that Pepsi used to
(illegally) ensure other retailers could not offer low margins on
Pepsi?
lanfeust6 wrote 7 min ago:
I didn't. I didn't contend whether the actions were kosher, I
contended the ridiculous idea that they "raised prices
everywhere".
mistrial9 wrote 15 hours 16 min ago:
> a relative handful of rich people
no, not clear at all.. it is a system that filters. "rich people"
go broke all the time, Britain too.. There are serious structural
problems certainly but that does not describe them
SpicyLemonZest wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
I guess I'm not sure where you read a claim that rich people can
never go broke into the original comment. They absolutely can.
That's why they often - as they seem to have done here - cut side
deals to protect their revenue streams at the expense of
competition. There's a VP at Walmart who stands to lose a lot of
money if people start buying their Pepsi elsewhere, and a VP at
Pepsi who stands to lose a lot of money if their products are
less visible in the nation's Walmarts, so they've agreed to
cooperate and mutually reduce the risk that their orgs perform
poorly.
autoexec wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
billionaires only tend to "go broke" when they commit massive
amounts of crime, mostly against other rich people.
lanfeust6 wrote 12 hours 54 min ago:
Dynastic wealth also tends to dissipate significantly in a
generation or two, as heirs fail to generate the same level of
wealth and just spend it (plus it's divided).
venturecruelty wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
Thanks, I'll pay my rent with this information when I get
laid off.
lanfeust6 wrote 6 min ago:
Not sure what you're trying to say with that non-sequitur.
janalsncm wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
Corporations are a funny kind of alien intelligence. Producing a
better product or a lower price is just one way to ensure their
survival. Another is to manipulate the rules of the market itself,
including the rule enforcers.
venturecruelty wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
You can also just pay your workers in scrip and then hire
Pinkertons to kill them if they get uppity about it. It's hard
not to become cynical when people seem almost willfully ignorant
of the despicable history of capital in this country...
OgsyedIE wrote 14 hours 58 min ago:
It's the product of an evolutionary process. You could scrap
capitalism entirely and still get cartel formation, since you
have agents with varied traits competing to gain the resources to
be selected to reproduce [their continued existence, into the
future].
A couple other ways of looking at it come from Bataille, Odum,
Prigogine or Schmitt.
levocardia wrote 15 hours 53 min ago:
Seems awfully dumb to attempt the whole "collusion on prices" thing
when both you and your partner in crime are locked in your own
cutthroat duopoly battles. What's to stop Coca-cola+Target from turning
around and crushing Walmart+Pepsi on pricing the instant they try to
"price-gouge"?
recursivecaveat wrote 14 hours 49 min ago:
It's kind of like what's to stop you from stealing your neighbor's
lawn gnome? You get a free gnome once and now neither of you can ever
have anything on your property not bolted down ever again. Better to
not hurt both of you by rocking the boat and instead slowly raise
prices together. Cooperation is only hard when there's a lot of
people involved.
jazzyjackson wrote 15 hours 30 min ago:
Coca cola doesn't sell food, Pepsi owns a ton of brands, anything
they can mix corn syrup with it seems.
taurath wrote 15 hours 46 min ago:
Itâs not cutthroat, itâs comfortable partnership with a cutthroat
veneer. If either of them wins, they have a monopoly and are at
higher risk of regulation or breakup. So they fight openly over small
fries, and keep writing dividend checks.
They write the rules.
darth_avocado wrote 15 hours 48 min ago:
The whole point of Duopoly is to have a âcompetitorâ so that you
can continue to act as a monopoly behind the scenes while avoiding
the appearance of a monopoly. You get to point finger at the other
guy when thereâs scrutiny and argue thereâs no monopoly, but also
increase your own prices when your competitor does it.
cowpig wrote 15 hours 48 min ago:
Monopolist economic surplus?
JKCalhoun wrote 15 hours 48 min ago:
We're now to a point where we are cheering on a battle between
duopolies.
venturecruelty wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
How is that different from any regular election year?
mgiampapa wrote 15 hours 31 min ago:
RC Cola, this is your moment to shine.
toomuchtodo wrote 17 hours 20 min ago:
Complaint:
HTML [1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.6355...
JKCalhoun wrote 15 hours 42 min ago:
Something like this has been going on in the restaurant world since
seemingly forever. When I worked at a pizza joint (40-some years ago)
we only served Pepsi drinks.
I was young and dumb enough then not to know that, for example, 7-Up
and Sprite were not independent soft-drinks. I assumed every flavor
of soda was its own company. I soon started to notice the drink
pattern based on whether they had Coke or Pepsi. Those two owned all
the other flavorsâand they each had their own variant of the
other's.
I was told too by management that we only bought Pepsi drinks. Again,
native me thought, "Why not have both Coke and Pepsi and let the
customer decide?" I am not sure whether there was a pricing issue
that prevented management from buying bothâlike the loss of a
discount for going Coke-only or whatever.
Of course you always saw signage, etc. around the restaurant with
Pepsi logos (or Coca-Cola logos at other restaurants) so you knew
there were gifts in other forms that one of the two would entice the
owner with.
What a slow growing up I have gone through since then. It seems like
the kind of thing they ought to teach in primary education.
pjc50 wrote 3 hours 54 min ago:
There's a complicated UK beer version of this with more parties.
Basically pubs might be any of:
- directly owned and managed by the brewery
- owned by the brewery and leased to a manager, like a franchise
- independent, but contracted exclusively
- genuinely independent
Contracted pubs may also have limited supplies of "guest ales".
Usually there's sufficient local competition to keep the pubs good,
but local monocultures can also be a problem.
carstout wrote 22 min ago:
Most of the pubs are owned by the PubCos
Back in the past it was mostly brewery owned with 6 big brewers
owning most of them.
So a law got passed in the 90s which limited the breweries to a
max of 2k pubs.
Unfortunately what happened was we ended up with a bunch of very
large Pubcos who were often linked to a particular brewery anyway
(some were formed by former brewery execs and the pubs were
"donated" in return for an agreement to keep buying from the
brewery").
The Pubcos started with low rents but high stock prices but now
go for both high rents and high stocks. Its why often see pubs
changing hands frequently when someone tries the dream of pub
landlordship but runs out of money.
Its why Wetherspoons is "cheap" since generally they convert
buildings and so have a freehouse model.
carlosjobim wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
This is world wide. Coke and Pepsi not only provide restaurants
with soft drinks, but also all other drinks, most importantly beer.
Local beverage distributors will be with either one or the other.
Restaurant owners will sign a contract with a distributor to buy
only from them, and in exchange get discounts, free equipment
rentals such as drink fridges and beer taps, and things like
sunshades, tables and chairs, signage, etc.
vondur wrote 14 hours 9 min ago:
Ha, the University where I work signed an exclusive agreement to
only sell Pepsi products on campus. I'm sure there was some
kickback money given to people here to push it through.
jimnotgym wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
Large student unions are also renowned for reselling their cheap
volume deal beer on the grey market to keep their volumes high. I
wonder if that is all through the books?
Coke used to sell their high volume customers a different syrup,
and give them different equipment to pour it, that was
incompatible with the low volume customers equipment, to try and
stop this
netsharc wrote 13 hours 11 min ago:
Coca-Cola supplies Disney{land,world}s with free drinks, in
exchange for their branding in the parks.
gruez wrote 13 hours 18 min ago:
>I'm sure there was some kickback money given to people here to
push it through.
Why? Is it that hard to imagine pepsi doing it in an above-board
way, eg. giving a discount to the university directly?
james_marks wrote 12 hours 52 min ago:
This was my first reaction, too.
The buyer at the university could just be doing their job,
signing contracts to ensure (ideally) stable vendors and a good
price by signing such a long contract term.
wahern wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
Coca-Cola is sort of like the Apple of cola in that they're
the upmarket brand almost everywhere around the globe. Unless
Coke has a sales, marketing, or branding angle (see, e.g.,
Disney deal mentioned elsethread), they won't discount nearly
as deeply as Pepsi, which is perennially in second-place at
best (Mt. Dew notwithstanding). Pepsi is the obvious choice
for any outlet where your customers are captive (e.g.
sit-down restaurants) and you don't otherwise care about
looking cheap for not offering Coca-Cola.
newsclues wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
I worked as a buyer in edu, oh the grease is built in to the
system from the vendors who will frequently shower you with
coffee and donuts to much friendlier offers to get sales.
Why is it so hard to imagine people who work in education would
have flexible ethics for personal gain?
wyldfire wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
> shower you with coffee and donuts to much friendlier offers
to get sales.
By bringing this up in a thread talking about kickbacks, it
sounds as if you're trying to equate the two. Please don't
equate this to a "kickback." It's not what that is. There's
real standards to what denotes bribes and kickbacks and
that's not what those are.
> flexible ethics for personal gain?
If you let the donuts influence your judgment, that is an
ethical problem -- I agree. But if you operate in your
organization's best interest you can enjoy the coffee and
donuts without remorse.
newsclues wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
I donât drink coffee or eat donuts (allergies) so I
wasnât influenced by the sales people but I understood
what was happening and saw it happen to more senior people
in the organization who were influenced and cost the
organization a lot of money because of âfriendshipâ
with a leader at a client who was very generous to the
executive.
gruez wrote 12 hours 52 min ago:
>shower you with coffee and donuts to much friendlier offers
to get sales.
If I was working a cushy admin job, I'd need way more bribery
than $5 worth of coffee and doughnuts to intentionally select
a worse vendor, especially if the decision would negatively
impact my colleagues and get me flak.
>Why is it so hard to imagine people who work in education
would have flexible ethics for personal gain?
Because if you read the other comments, there are perfectly
reasonable explanations that don't involve graft. Jumping to
"bribe" every time there's bad behavior is just lazy thinking
and means you don't actually figure out what the root of the
problem is.
newsclues wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
Thatâs you.
But a lot of people are poorly paid and free coffee is
nice.
It might not be enough to select a worse vendor but if two
are equal itâs easy to pick the one with the cute sales
representative who knows how you like your coffee.
Then there is the leadership who plays golf together and
use the company card to buy gifts (booze) for the deciders.
Itâs not bribery itâs just subtle influence;)
And itâs everywhere, itâs the same at the various
higher education colleges I worked at.
venturecruelty wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
>Because if you read the other comments, there are
perfectly reasonable explanations that don't involve graft.
Jumping to "bribe" every time there's bad behavior is just
lazy thinking and means you don't actually figure out what
the root of the problem is.
Right. I'm sure, in spite of this and the decades of
overwhelming evidence, this was all just a silly
coincidence, and they can lower food prices now.
Edit: I'm shitlimited to five posts per X number of hours,
so I'm going to respond here: the evidence is in TFA,
thanks.
gruez wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
>in spite of this and the decades of overwhelming
evidence
Where's all this "overwhelming evidence"? So far the only
that's presented is "my university is pepsi only so there
must be something shady going on" and "vendors buy me
coffee so there must be administrators corrupting
themselves and risking their 6 figure jobs for $5 worth
of inducements"
edit:
>Edit: I'm shitlimited to five posts per X number of
hours, so I'm going to respond here: the evidence is in
TFA, thanks.
Searches for "bribe" and "kickbacks" don't turn anything
up. If you're talking about the unsealed FTC complaint,
that's anti-competitive behavior, but not the "kickbacks"
that OP was talking about (ie. some administrator abusing
their position of trust to personally enrich themselves).
Both are bad, but they're not remotely comparable. For
one, in the case of kickbacks, the organization and its
members are harmed (through worse contracts), whereas for
whatever walmart and pepsi agreed to, both benefited.
RajT88 wrote 13 hours 47 min ago:
My wife's university has a totally egregious contract which is
exclusive to a food provider for cafeteria food and event
catering.
If you want to, say, have a student group sell cookies or
whatever, the provider has to approve and you have to pay to host
it.
The contract is for 10 years. No freaking way somebody signed
off on that without money under the table.
bigstrat2003 wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
My wife's employer has a very similar thing going on. They have
a cafeteria staffed by a catering company, and the contract
requires that they (the employer) use the catering company for
all things that take place in the building. A manager can't go
out and buy donuts for a meeting, instead they would have to
use the caterer who is both worse quality and more expensive.
This caterer even tried to get the company to chase off food
trucks that were coming to the area, though thankfully that
went nowhere because the food trucks were on public streets and
not private property.
It is truly an awful contract, with no benefit at all to the
employer that I can see. Like you, I conclude that some
executive must have gotten kickbacks for signing this.
wahern wrote 4 hours 24 min ago:
> It is truly an awful contract, with no benefit at all to
the employer that I can see.
The benefit is having an operating cafeteria (i.e. an
amenity) for a guaranteed period with little or zero
out-of-pocket expense other than providing the space. Unless
there's obviously high-demand (coffee?), no catering company
is going to commit to a long-term contract without ensuring
some minimum volume to maintain staffing. Anything food
related typically has ridiculously slim margins on average,
especially when you count all the failed projects.
Catering is often an exception, but not this kind of daily
staffed in-place catering. The most profitable kind of
catering is where you can prepare food offset for discrete
(though hopefully recurring) events across many (hopefully
repeat) clients, and where you can quickly ramp up or ramp
down staffing and facilities to minimize recurring costs.
conception wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
Itâs probably more there are only two or three companies, if
that, that can service a customer that large and meet their
requirements/SLAs by contract. And the three all happen to have
the same sort of agreements required.
diab0lic wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
Sodexo or Aramark I assume? Unfortunately standard practice on
University campuses across Canada and the USA.
RajT88 wrote 33 min ago:
Sodexo
nick__m wrote 11 hours 57 min ago:
At my institution there was a student revolt, chartwell was
kicked out and it is a work co-op. The quality has increased,
the employees are better treated and the cost stayed the
same, and stupid rules like that are no more !
phantasmish wrote 11 hours 58 min ago:
Yeah, exact same thing when I was reluctantly involved in a
clubâs leadership and organizing an on-campus event with
food 20+ years ago. I think it was Sodexo in our case. Must
be common.
khannn wrote 14 hours 22 min ago:
And Pizza Hut ran itself into the ground despite being incredibly
popular when I was a child
quitit wrote 15 hours 9 min ago:
The deals for this type of product positioning occur quite high up
in the chain.
To give an example Yum! brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, etc) was
formed as a subsidiary of PepsiCo. Although PepsiCo has divested
from Yum, their pre-existing relationship is why these restaurants
only serve Pepsi's soft drinks.
Deal-making is also why you see patterns like this emerge in other
places such as convenience stores that only sell beverages from the
Coca-cola company (i.e. higher volume sales from just one supplier
yields a better discount than splitting sales across multiple
suppliers).
It's relatively rarer to see more than one beverage supplier at a
restaurant, club or convenience outlet.
CM30 wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
Is convenience stores only selling Coke or Pepsi an American
thing?
Because over here in the UK, every shop I've seen that sells soft
drinks sells both brands at the same time. Probably alongside a
bunch of others.
Then again, the branded coolers seem to be more of a thing in
restaurants and takeaways rather than shops.
raverbashing wrote 2 hours 53 min ago:
Coca-cola has a President (probably called a VP in other
companies) designated only for their relationship with McD
HTML [1]: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/leadership/rob...
wahern wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
For convenience stores, particularly ones with few or no built-in
wall coolers, the typical deal is the Coca-Cola or Pepsi
distributor will provide and maintain a free-standing cooler, but
it can only hold products from that distributor (often the
distributor stocks it for you). Thus you'll typically see
Coca-Cola and Pepsi products segregated in different coolers, if
the store sells both.
I presume, but don't know first-hand, that for built-in coolers
you want stocked by the distributor, they'll also require
segregation. Frito-Lay distributors operate similarly--they'll
come in and stock your shelf if you want (I dunno if there's a
sales premium), but typically they'll require the Frito-Lay
products be segregated, and they'll provide branded shelving if
you want.
pests wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
> It's relatively rarer to see more than one beverage supplier at
a restaurant, club or convenience outlet.
Wait what? What do you mean by convenience outlet? We must have
different definitions.
BobbyTables2 wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
Donât they have explicit agreements to not sell the competing
vendorsâ products?
Or is that just urban legend?
The only restaurants Iâve ever seen selling Coke and Pepsi were
in less developed countriesâ¦
SoftTalker wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
There are some but it's rare. Most restaurants sell only one or
the other.
toast0 wrote 15 hours 22 min ago:
> Again, native me thought, "Why not have both Coke and Pepsi and
let the customer decide?" I am not sure whether there was a pricing
issue that prevented management from buying bothâlike the loss of
a discount for going Coke-only or whatever.
There's a bunch of pricing stuff (typically the bottler sells syrup
and rents dispensers and may supply drinkware, and you get
discounts on everything when you buy more syrup, and you get
advertising subsidies when you put the brand logo in your ad, etc),
but there's also logistics. More options means a bigger soda
fountain and probably more space storing syrup.
I'm not sure I've ever seen mixed brands in a single dispenser
(other than 7up+DrPepper which is bottled regionally by Coke
bottlers in some regions and Pepsi bottlers in others; so you might
see Coke with 7up and DrPepper or with Sprite and MrPibb). But,
rarely, I've seen dispensers from both. Mostly at convenience
stores and also the Yahoo employee cafeteria at the Sunnyvale HQ on
First Ave (which they left some time ago). Some restaurants that
don't have a fountain will stock cans from multiple brands, too.
All that said, from my life experience, very few people express a
strong preference, giving customers a choice probably isn't worth
the effort.
Sleaker wrote 15 hours 30 min ago:
Are you referring to the fact that 7up/Dr pepper are distributed by
pepsico? They still have historically been independent from the big
2 as far as product branding since inception, most recently being
owned by Schweppes.
pests wrote 10 hours 56 min ago:
I think they were just giving an example, and had assumed each
separate flavor was a separate company, but happened to choose a
bad one with 7up as it is a different beast then the rest.
Telemakhos wrote 14 hours 37 min ago:
Dr. Pepper is distributed by Coke in some states/countries, Pepsi
in others, and by its own distribution network in like 30 US
states. A friend likened it, not without a certain
verisimilitude, to the result of the Treaty of Tordesillas in
1494.
pixl97 wrote 12 hours 5 min ago:
The Dr Pepper/Coke agreement was terminated this year.
HTML [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dr-pepper-end-partnersh...
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