The Federal Trade Commission’s current agency leadership has shown more resistance to corporate mega-mergers than in the past.
“If you live in Dallas, you’re not going to go shop for groceries in Lubbock,” Lopatka said.
“They have a philosophical, ideological, hostility to mergers involving large corporations and so I don’t know that the path forward is quite as clear, that they’d ever get to a point where the FTC would say, ‘We’re satisfied with the divestitures that you’re proposing,’"he said. An FTC challenge would need to demonstrate that the merger could substantially lessen competition. The companies could argue that immediate but limited impacts on competition should be set aside with an eye toward the future.
“If you’re divesting union stores, they may be less attractive to some other company,” Lopatka said. “When most of the industry isn’t unionized, they might not be interested in acquiring union stores.”
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