Reply #67: First of all, you're talking about a MonopSONy

[ConservativeDemocrat]

Not a MonoPOLy. A Monopoly is when there is effectively only one seller.
A Monopsony is when there is effectively only one buyer.

But even that doesn't hold water. Vlasic wasn't forced to sell pickles to
WalMart. Originally, they'd had plenty of other buyers. What happened was
that they decided to go the cheap, bulk, route in selling pickles, and it
ruined their brand. With pickles everywhere, people thought of them not as
a quality product, but a bulk one.

But even then, they could have chosen to pull out of WalMart. It would have
meant eliminating all the growth they'd done, laying off most of the people
they'd hired since they got the fat WalMart contract, but the company would
have survived. Instead, they chose to be bought out, which is probably better
for their workers, if not their investors.

The bottom line, however, is that there is absolutely no law in the U.S. against
having a monopsony, or "abusing" monopsony power. The laws against illegal
maintenance of a monopoly isn't there to protect the competition, it's there to
protect the public from abusively high prices due to an artificial restriction
of supply. In a Monopsony, the public gets extremely low prices. And if
you don't want to sell to a monopsonist, just go into another business or line
of work.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community