An inquiry was started in the United States over recent months about what might appear to you to
be a minute, little problem, but opens up into a social problem. Here's the problem: toilet paper.
You remember at the beginning of the pandemic suddenly there was a shortage of toilet paper,
and people began to hoard toilet paper since being without it is indeed inconvenient. Well,
it has surfaced again, this shortage of toilet paper, only now it's not quite a shortage.
It turns out that if you want toilet paper go to Walmart or Amazon or Target. They got plenty.
It's all the little, independent, small stores that are kind of short on the toilet paper. You
get to that part of the shelf in the little store and there's only one role left and it isn't quite
wrapped properly. What's going on? Turns out (and this is very important) that in the difficulties
of the pandemic, and in the difficulties of the economic crash, and in the difficulties of global
supply chains that bring these products to us, one of the ways that the companies
making and distributing them handle shortages is by favoring some customers over others. And it
will come as no surprise to you that they favor the companies that are the biggest,
that are the largest source of profits for them. And that means you're destroying small business.
You're teaching customer by customer that when you leave your home to go get something you need
you probably shouldn't go to the store nearby, not to the store where you know the family, not to
the store that you've been going to for all these years, but to one of those big box stores because
they're more likely to have it. For those of you that are not familiar, this is a problem small
businesses have had. The so-called "competitive market" destroys small business and is a very
useful thing for big businesses who can use their size to crush the little ones. That's why
on the 4th of July the speeches about the "joys of competition" tend to come from bigger businesses,
not from little. And the little ones got together and they got something done in the 1930s partly by
being allied with the working class. Here's what they got. It's called the Robinson-Patman Act, a
law passed in 1936 here in the United States that expressly forbids companies that sell to favor
large over small businesses. And the anti-trust division of the justice department is supposed to
monitor, and control, and enforce that law, which it has not done and is not now doing.
That has led for example the National Grocers Association to call on congress and federal
antitrust agencies to scrutinize large retailers for violating the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936.
We need that. But it's not going to happen, because the big companies have always reacted
first by opposing laws like that (which they did), and if those laws pass anyway then they evade the
laws. They get around the laws. They amend the laws. They buy the politicians to repeal the laws.
You know, like the Glass-Steagall Act with the banks. It's the same game.
And if they can't get rid of the law, well, then they work around it. The thing that passed the law
is the only thing that will get the law enforced: that would be a political alliance of workers
and small businesses to help each other, and to see who their common enemy is, and that's the
biggest businesses in this society. It's been that way and the sooner these two movements
(working class, small businesses) understand the alliance they need, the sooner they'll be
able to solve these kinds of problems, rather than complain when it's a little bit late in the game.