Report: Amazon’s Monopoly
Amazon is destroying competition and market diversity, leaving us with fewer choices, less innovation, and diminished opportunities. … Read More
Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip on the Economy Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communities
Amazon has extended its tentacles across our economy. In this report, we pull back the curtain on the company, and find that it’s at the center of increasing inequality and diminishing opportunity, and that it’s concentrating power in ways that endanger competition, community life, and democracy. We also examine how public policy should address Amazon’s high costs.… Read More
Report: Monopoly Power and the Decline of Small Business
Small businesses have been in steep decline. In this report, we argue that anticompetitive behavior by large, dominant corporations is largely to blame and present three reasons to bring a commitment to fair markets for small businesses back into antitrust policy. The report won an award for antitrust scholarship in 2017. … Read More
After Three Decades of Neglect, Antitrust Is Back on the Democratic Platform
For the first time in 28 years, the Democratic Party platform calls for vigorous, stepped-up enforcement of our anti-monopoly laws. This remarkable shift in policy was made possible in part by the Bernie Sanders movement, but it’s also the product of years of advocacy by scholars and activists who believe that high levels of concentration in banking, retail, agribusiness and other sectors are ravaging our economy and democracy.… Read More
With 269 Stores Closing, Is this the Beginning of the End for Walmart?
All great empires eventually fall. This is as true in retail as it is in geopolitics. In this story, originally published in Common Dreams, ILSR co-director Stacy Mitchell delves into the reality of Walmart’s retail overbuilding, and how our local economies have suffered due to that disastrous decision.… Read More
With 269 Stores Closing, Is this the Beginning of the End for Walmart?
All great retail empires eventually fall. A&P did. So did Montgomery Ward. But Walmart’s recent announcement that it would close 269 stores may not be an initial stumble on a path toward demise so much as a move to abandon communities that it has decided simply aren’t worth the trouble. We look at both the bad and the good fallout from Walmart’s pullback, and how its closures are best explained as a side effect of its main strategy for dominating the economy: overbuilding regions to the point of not just destroying competition but cannibalizing its own sales, while communities bear the consequences.… Read More
Key Studies: Why Independent Matters
A growing body of research is giving us new ways to quantify the harms of bigness and the benefits of local ownership. In this post, we round-up the important studies and provide the evidence that policymakers can use to craft better laws, business owners can use to rally support, and citizens can use to organize their communities.… Read More
New Analysis: Amazon Warehouses Impose Hidden Costs on Communities
Amazon is on a building spree, and many local officials are eager to bring one of its giant fulfillment centers to their own backyard. But a new analysis from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) indicates that communities are losing more than they gain in these projects. Contact: Stacy Mitchell, 207-232-3681 Co-Director, Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) … Read More
5 Things Local Officials Need to Know Before Welcoming an Amazon Warehouse
Amazon fulfillment centers impose so many hidden costs on local economies that cities ought to reconsider welcoming them at all, much less greasing the way with public funds.… Read More