By Chris Jones

Affordability is the defining political issue of the moment, and antitrust is increasingly part of the conversation. Yet one of the most powerful tools for lowering consumer prices has spent 40 years in exile, condemned to obscurity by a claim that was never true: that the Robinson-Patman Act (RPA) makes goods more expensive, and that it is too difficult to enforce. The economic evidence and enforcement landscape now point in the opposite direction. As policymakers and enforcers search for practical ways to reduce prices and restore competition, one of the most effective solutions may have been hiding in plain sight.

The RPA bars suppliers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same goods, with express exceptions for cost-justified volume discounts and for meeting a competitor’s price. Enacted in 1936 to check the buyer power of the original retail giant, the Great A&P, it once anchored roughly half the FTC’s enforcement work and sustained a vibrant marketplace of independent retailers. Then, amid 1970s inflation and the rise of the consumer-welfare paradigm, it became a scapegoat. The one antitrust statute that treats injury to a single competitor as an antitrust harm could not be squared with a doctrine focused solely on market-wide effects, so enforcers and courts read it into dormancy.

Here is what almost no one acknowledges: the case against the act was never empirical. As recently as 2014, the FTC’s own deputy director of economics conceded that no formal study of its price effects had ever been conducted. The familiar criticisms from Robert Bork, Richard Posner and Herbert Hovenkamp, trace back not to economists but to one another. The theory that bigger buyers are inherently more efficient, and their negotiated discounts flow to consumers as lower prices, was elegant but untested.

The real-world evidence cuts the other way. Buyer power has not been passed through to shoppers. Instead, it has been converted into a competitive moat. Consider the club channel. Evidence from a recent RPA case found that Costco typically applies a 12–15% markup, while the independent wholesalers who compete for the same customers run on 6–8%. Costco’s shelf price is lower anyway, not because it is more efficient, but because discriminatory supply terms let it earn a higher margin on a lower price. Suppliers themselves have confirmed directly to smaller grocers: meeting club-store packaging and delivery demands often costs them more, not less, which is precisely why the cost-justification defense so often fails. These discounts are untethered from real cost savings.

The newest data confirms consumer harm. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that from 2006 to 2020, food inflation ran meaningfully higher in lower-income metro areas, with retailer concentration a contributing cause. A first-of-its-kind empirical study by Aslihan Asil of Yale, examining the very liquor sector now under FTC scrutiny, found that price discrimination produces a measurable consumer-welfare loss, because chain discounts drive independents out and thin the competition that disciplines prices. The 40-year assumption has it backwards: it is the absence of enforcement that raises prices.

This is why support now spans the spectrum. In January 2026, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and Sen. Mike Rounds, joined by four Republican colleagues, pressed the DOJ and FTC to use every tool available, the Robinson-Patman Act foremost, against economic discrimination targeting small businesses. A dozen House Republicans led by Rep. Mike Rulli sent a parallel letter the same week. That pressure is becoming policy as the FY2026 FTC appropriations bill Committee report urges the agency to deploy tools like the act to restore competition in food and pharmacy markets.

Even the commission’s Republicans see it. Chairman Andrew Ferguson has written that price discrimination driven by a large buyer’s market power can harm both competitors and consumers, and that the act can no longer be ignored. Commissioner Mark Meador has called non-enforcement “lawless” and likely harmful to consumers. The public is already there: A November 2025 Rasmussen Reports survey found that nearly three-quarters of Americans, across both parties, believe large companies wield too much power, and roughly two-thirds agree that stronger antitrust enforcement would help lower prices.

Predictably, the old guard is mobilizing. The Competitive Enterprise Institute recently published paired papers by former FTC Chairman Tim Muris and economist Bruce Kobayashi urging continued de-emphasis, and commentators such as Stephen Moore warn that revival will punish discounts and enrich trial lawyers. But these arguments aim at a straw man. No serious proponent of the act opposes genuine efficiencies or cost-justified volume discounts. The statute expressly protects them. What it prohibits is discrimination disconnected from cost: the kind that lets scale buy a price no efficiency earned.

And the status quo is changing in court. For all the insistence that the act is unenforceable, plaintiffs are winning. The Ninth Circuit’s 2023 decision in U.S. Wholesale v. Innovation Ventures rejected the assumption that different store formats (like club, conventional, dollar) do not compete, putting the channel-based excuse for discrimination on shaky legal footing. Then in February 2026, the court affirmed a jury verdict and a global pricing injunction in L.A. International v. Prestige Brands (the Clear Eyes case) and clarified how to calculate the “net price” a buyer actually pays, making both discrimination and damages far easier to prove.

These wins deliver injunctive relief and robust fee awards without ruinously expensive damages models, and the FTC’s own suit against Southern Glazer’s for illegal price discrimination has survived a motion to dismiss. Meanwhile, a dozen state price-discrimination statutes, several stronger than federal law, sit largely forgotten on the books, while states like New York appear poised to pass new ones.

The opening is real, but it will not be seized by isolated plaintiffs who fear retaliation. That is why the National Grocers Association and the National Community Pharmacists Association relaunched the Main Street Competition Coalition this spring as a permanent advocacy organization. The coalition exists to supply what individual victims cannot: strength in numbers, the data and expertise to clear the hurdles courts have erected, and coordinated public and private enforcement that makes retaliation impractical when whole industries stand together.

For lawyers, it is an underdeveloped field with sympathetic facts, recoverable fees, and growing favorable precedent. For policymakers and public antitrust enforcers, it is the rare solution that is good law, good economics, and good politics at once. The tools exist. The evidence has caught up. What remains is the will to use them, and a reawakened Main Street ready to help.

Chris Jones is Executive Director of the Main Street Competition Coalition, a national coalition of small businesses, farmers, and trade associations working to combat excessive market power through stronger antitrust enforcement.