OPINION: If these practices aren’t monopolistic pricing, then what are they?

In 2015, Albertsons and Safeway merged into a single company. That ended all competition between those two chain supermarkets. All competing stores in towns with both stores saw one store close. Prices went up on groceries to pay for the $9.2 billion merger. Lewiston had a Safeway competing against Albertsons. Safeway closed. Albertsons stayed open.

Albertsons and Kroger now plan to do the same, raising prices to pay for their merger.

The merger those chains plan will cost $25 billion that they plan to pay for by closing stores — and raising prices. This will drive up core inflation for food and increase unemployment. Who wants to pay $25 billion more for food? The proposed merger also seems to violate the antitrust laws by creating a near monopoly. The Biden administration has opposed that merger because it would create monopolies in many cities and states while driving up food prices all over the country.

Do we really need to see higher unemployment, higher food prices and an illegal monopoly?

Two years ago, Coca-Cola and Pepsi drinks retailed on sale in every grocery store in Lewiston and most of northern Idaho at 99 cents for a two-liter bottle. Today, that same bottle can be found on sale for $2.99. The bottler is here in Lewiston. Did their workers get their wages tripled? Did the delivery drivers’ wages get tripled? Or are the companies raising prices in collusion with each other out of greed and to influence politics? Is this illegal price fixing?

Conservatives all over the country are asking these same questions, even in the reddest parts of California and Texas. I have liberal and conservative relatives in both states.

Who is colluding — the grocery chains or the companies that make drinks and processed foods? Why isn’t Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador investigating? Why isn’t the U.S. Department of Justice investigating?

U.S. oil production is at its highest level ever and the U.S. does not export oil. But the price of gasoline and diesel keeps going up for no apparent reason. Are the oil companies colluding in price fixing? Sure looks like it.

Go anywhere in Idaho, except an Indian reservation, and see that the price of a gallon of either gasoline or diesel varies only by a penny or so among all gas stations The price is 20 cents a gallon cheaper on the reservation. You can see these same almost uniform price hikes in Utah, Colorado and Montana. Only Wyoming seems to avoid this uniform pricing.

In the past two months, local prices have gone up by 50 cents a gallon to match the gas tax increase in Washington state. Idaho did not raise our gas taxes. Is that a result of gouging, collusion and price fixing — or is there another reason? Is it the gas stations that are colluding or are the oil companies engaged in price fixing?

Why isn’t Labrador investigating? Why aren’t the feds investigating?

Exxon and Mobil no longer compete; they appear to fix prices. Exxon-Mobil profits last year were $36 billion and they got a subsidy from us taxpayers because they don’t have to pay taxes on 15% of their profits generated by oil they pump from federal land. Other oil companies, such as Chevron and Unocal, get the same subsidies. Idahoans pay higher taxes to provide those subsidies and then the oil companies use ratchet-up pricing and don’t compete. This looks like cartel or monopolistic behavior. It’s probably illegal.

We used to have only one phone company for the entire United States, AT&T.

AT&T stopped innovating in the 1960s when we still had wall phones with rotary dials. At the time, its biggest innovation was colored, plastic phones.

The company was arrogant. It stayed deliberately understaffed. And it maintained monopoly prices. It was Ma Bell or the phone company (TPC as ridiculed in comedies). In other words, it was a cartel. The Republican Reagan administration had sued AT&T over its practices and prices. In 1982, AT&T had to break up into competing companies and allow new companies to compete, using AT&T lines. No longer did it take a week or more to get a phone. Prices dropped and we got touch-tone phones, portable phones inside the house and, eventually, cellphones.

The federal government needs to treat conglomerates that act like monopolies as it did with AT&T — break them up and bring competition back to the marketplace.

Labrador should be doing the same in Idaho.

Sherry, of Lewiston, taught school and also worked for 30 years on Idaho state insurance laws.