Monopolies Killed My Hometown

In today's episode I dive into Chapter 7 of the Report of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads. This chapter is all about the 1934 Canadian retail scene and the impact of mass buyers, e.g. chain stores and department stores, on smaller retailers, producers and manufacturers. In case you couldn't guess - it wasn't good. This chapter is titled 'Distribution' and got me thinking of our retail system as the distribution network for our producers and manufacturers. Looking at our retailers as the national distribution network caused me to think of retail as essential infrastructure just like streets, railroads, water and sewer lines, and power lines. Allowing anyone to dominate any of these pieces of infrastructure allows them to extract excess fees and expenses from others. We've let a handful of companies dominate our retail scene again. We need to reform our competition laws to free our retail scene from these dominant players.

Show Notes

In today's episode I dive into Chapter 7 of the Report of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads. This chapter is all about the 1934 Canadian retail scene and the impact of mass buyers, e.g. chain stores and department stores, on smaller retailers, producers and manufacturers. In case you couldn't guess - it wasn't good. This chapter is titled 'Distribution' and got me thinking of our retail system as the distribution network for our producers and manufacturers. Looking at our retailers as the national distribution network caused me to think of retail as essential infrastructure just like streets, railroads, water and sewer lines, and power lines. Allowing anyone to dominate any of these pieces of infrastructure allows them to extract excess fees and expenses from others. We've let a handful of companies dominate our retail scene again. We need to reform our competition laws to free our retail scene from these dominant players.

Links from today's episode:

What is Monopolies Killed My Hometown?

Do you wonder why small towns, small businesses and people seem to be falling behind and you don’t know why? Feeling helpless about whether any of us can do anything to halt the decline of the places we love? Well, we know a secret. Our society fought the same battles about 100 years ago, and small towns won.

Join Andrew Cameron, the founder of the Center for Small Town Success and small business owner, every other week as he rediscovers our Canadian Anti-Monopoly tradition. The goal is to learn how we successfully fought back against Monopolies in the 1900s so we can restore power to small towns, small businesses and individuals today.

Listen to this podcast if you want to learn more about Canadian Competition Policy and to join the Anti-Monopoly movement. #freeboswell #cdnpoli