The FTC alleges that Syngenta and Corteva maintained pesticide monopolies by paying distributors not to carry generic products. Pesticide firms aren’t the only businesses using pay-to-block schemes.
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Retailers are positioning themselves to charge customers based on their willingness to pay—so that my Burberry-dressed neighbor pays more than my thrifty neighbor for the same product. How are retailers tracking our shopping habits, and what does it mean for you?
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At the National Retail Federation annual conference, retailers discuss how to use big data to personalize customer prices. Tactics include in-store cameras that track which products you’re examining, so Kroger can send you a coupon for chips as you’re still roaming the salsa aisle. Or if you buy cat food towards the end of the month, you’ll be e-mailed a special offer on the 25th, rather than showered with ads all the time. But do the savings outweigh the creepiness?
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Imagine cows fed and milked entirely by robots. Or tomatoes that send an e-mail when they need more water. Or a farm where all the decisions about where to plant seeds, spray fertilizer and steer tractors are made by software on servers on the other side of the sea. This is what more and more of our agriculture may come to look like in the years ahead, as farming meets Big Data.
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It’s an industry that’s largely invisible to consumers, yet central to feeding the world’s sweet tooth. Cocoa processing — the process of turning raw cocoa beans into powder, liquor, and butter — is a major step in creating the candy bars and truffles that line store shelves. And thanks to a recent pair of recent business deals, it’s an industry that may never be the same.
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Believe it or not, there used to be a wide variety of regional candy bars stocking grocery store shelves. But over the last 50 years, the biggest companies have gobbled up the smaller ones to create a highly concentrated industry. How did Hershey's, Mars, and Nestle take over our shelves of sweets?
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In July, the public learned that Goldman Sachs and several other large banks have morphed into giant merchants of physical goods, routinely shipping oil, running power plants, and amassing stocks of metals so large that Coca Cola accused them of hoarding. It was a disconcerting moment, as regulators realized that firms so recently known for their explosive mortgage-backed securities also deal in goods that can literally explode.But that was only half the story.
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Today, most chicken farmers are growing their animals on contract for huge meatpackers, a system that some farmers call "worse than sharecropping." The Obama Administration promised to investigate how concentration in the chicken industry was negatively impacting farmers. But then, mysteriously, their investigation disappeared. What happened?
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