Powerful Congressman Forgets How Stores Work
Patrick Hedger
November 5, 2021
Look, it’s fair to say most of us haven’t gotten out much over the last two years or so due to the pandemic. Yet, while Covid-19 definitely accelerated the pre-pandemic trend of online shopping, most people still remember what it’s like to shop at brick and mortar grocery stores, department stores, and pharmacies… except for Congressman David Cicilline (D—Rhode Island) apparently.
Last month, Cicilline tweeted this:
Cicilline’s next tweet made clear that his ire is directed at online retail giant Amazon:
For a moment, it certainly sounds like Cicilline has uncovered a uniquely nefarious business practice… that moment being about half a second. As many, many other folks on Twitter quickly pointed out, what Cicilline described is not something unique to Amazon, but exactly what just about every traditional retailer has done for practically forever.
Exactly right, @mmmRamen. And speaking of ramen, check out this deal on Walmart’s “copy,” as Congressman Cicilline would put it, of the popular, affordable chicken noodle soup… available online!
As others pointed out, the practice of offering cheaper, generic or store brand goods is hardly limited to groceries. Drug stores get in on the action too:
The case against Cicilline’s argument gets even worse here because he represents Rhode Island, home of the nation’s largest drug store chain, CVS Pharmacy. CVS tends to be the butt of a lot of jokes about its excessively long receipts. Those receipts, however, are a product of CVS’s ExtraCare Card program. This program gives customers coupons and automatic discounts based on the consumer data provided by tracking individual customers’ purchases. CVS also uses this data to fill its shelves with CVS-brand generic alternatives for practically everything it sells in its stores.
Two other responses, one from @TheTomKnighton and another from the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, make two additional important counterpoints to Cicilline’s gripe with Amazon. First, price is not the only thing consumers are sensitive to. Many consumers put high value in certain brand quality and other attributes. If this were not true, then designer and luxury brand products wouldn’t exist. But, because this is true, most stores, including Amazon, must also carry the brands consumers are looking for, not just the generic alternatives.
The second point made here is that there are plenty of other retailers of all shapes and sizes to patronize if you don’t like using Amazon. That said, it seems like the market has spoken loud and clear about stores engaging in exactly what Cicilline wants to stop Amazon from doing, as many others pointed out:
The examples of the silliness of Congressman Cicilline’s argument against Amazon go on and on. There are 535 members of Congress between the House and Senate, and plenty of them, on both sides of the aisle, are prone to saying strange things. The problem is that David Cicilline is not just some random member of Congress. Cicilline is the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. He’s spearheading Congress’s efforts to overhaul antitrust laws to narrowly target companies like Amazon, while leaving their competitors free to continue doing all the things demonstrated above.
There’s no doubt there’s a role for government in ensuring companies don’t engage in fraud, intellectual property theft, or other deceptive practices that harm competition to the detriment of consumers. But it’s painfully clear that preventing Amazon from doing exactly what its competitors have done all along, and what consumes expect of them, doesn’t meet that mission.
Patrick Hedger is Vice President of Policy at Taxpayers Protection Alliance.