According to Hsieh, McCaffrey’s Food Market was the only supermarket in Princeton, N.J., when he took a job at the university in 1998. Then Wegmans, a chain based in Rochester, N.Y., came to town. “On the opening day there was a line of people,” he said, resorting to anecdote rather than data to get his point across. “They wanted to be the first ones to get into the store.” Since then, Whole Foods has also opened a store in Princeton, and McCaffrey’s is still in business. Consumers, Hsieh said, are better off.
“When chains come to town, first of all, they bring the productivity that made them a successful chain in the first place,” Rossi-Hansberg said. They also bring variety, he said. “Now you can go to every town in America and have a macchiato.”
We also talked about hospital mergers, which have alarmed antitrust authorities. In big cities, big nonprofit hospital chains have been scooping up smaller independents. “What’s not mentioned frequently is that whenever they do this, what they also do is build networks of outpatient clinics that never existed,” Hsieh said.
Mitchell told me how much she likes to shop at locally owned establishments and small chains in Portland. She loves Maine Hardware, which calls itself “Proudly local, fiercely independent, wicked helpful.” The store is connected with Ace Hardware Corp., a buying cooperative that’s entirely owned by local retailers.
“The theory that when national companies spread to smaller cities and towns, they provide more competition in those local markets sounds good,” she wrote in a follow-up email. “But one can point to many past examples where the opposite was the case — ultimately leading to much less competition and community harms. The proliferation of national supermarket chains like Walmart and Kroger has left local grocery markets far more consolidated and less competitive, for example.”