Word: patman
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...bureaus, FTC exercises all three functions at once. Founded during another reform era - Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom - FTC is charged with 1) prevention °i unfair competition, 2) enforcement of certain sections of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, including the 1936 amendment known as the Robinson-Patman Act. It also has broad investigatory powers. Most famed FTC investigation was the eight-year probe of public utility holding companies, which netted 84 volumes of evidence and resulted in the Public Utility Act of 1935. Big as it is, touching as many phases of business as it does...
...effect, said the FTC, "has been unreasonably to suppress competition, bring about unlawful discrimination in prices for goods of the same grade and quality, substantially increase the cost of golf balls to retailers and the public and to discriminate against small business enterprises." A separate count under the Robinson-Patman Act charged discrimination in price "between different purchasers of golf balls of like grade and quality, the effect being to lessen competition and create monopoly...
Last October, four months after the Robinson-Patman Act went into effect, the Baltimore purchasing agent for Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. received a letter from A. & P. headquarters: "Go through your records carefully and see if there has not been some entry or some correspondence which might come in for criticism or complaint. You are buying large quantities of merchandise from many shippers for a large organization and must realize that everything you do is certain to be subject to review, or even investigation, and we urge you to handle your dealings accordingly...
...more than might be expected from a chainstore with 15,000 outlets and annual sales of nearly $1,000,000,000 was this shrewd bit of foresight. Outlawing price discrimination and many another favor long demanded by the country's big buyers, the Robinson-Patman Act is fundamentally anti-chainstore legislation. Sure enough, in its efforts to retain at least a measure of the advantages of large-scale buying, A. & P. was soon enmeshed in Federal Trade Commission proceedings, dragging in a number of ifs suppliers, who are equally liable under...
...this poor year the can makers unanimously blamed the Robinson-Patman Act, which forced revision of their contracts with can users. For once that much-debated measure brought lower instead of higher prices to consumers. Since the law tends to make big and little customers pay the same prices, the general rule is to bring quotations in line by boosting prices to the big customers. In the can business, where the big customers are very big, this rule apparently could not be applied. It is too easy for the big canners to make their own cans, as Heinz and Phillips...