IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/tvecsg/v93y2002i1p62-82.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Transforming the Corporate Landscape of US Food Retailing: Market Power, Financial Re‐engineering and Regulation

Author

Listed:
  • Neil Wrigley

Abstract

A dramatic wave of consolidation swept through the US food retail industry during the late 1990s, transforming its corporate geography. This paper considers the causes of that consolidation wave, placing emphasis on the regulatory history of the industry, the holding back of consolidation by financial re‐engineering during the 1980s, and the subsequent release, following a critical period of deleveraging during the early 1990s, of the scale‐related pricing power/operating margin advantages of the major multiregional operators. It also considers the response of the leading firms in the industry to the rapid incursion of an unusually powerful new market entrant – Wal‐Mart, the world’s largest retailer – and assesses the link between Wal‐Mart’s entry into the industry and the consolidation wave. Finally, the paper debates the extent to which a shift in regulatory policy and practice by the Federal Trade Commission at the very end of the decade may have altered the pattern and scale of consolidation in the industry, and the consequences of regulatory tightening for the future landscape of US food retail.

Suggested Citation

  • Neil Wrigley, 2002. "Transforming the Corporate Landscape of US Food Retailing: Market Power, Financial Re‐engineering and Regulation," Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG, vol. 93(1), pages 62-82, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:tvecsg:v:93:y:2002:i:1:p:62-82
    DOI: 10.1111/1467-9663.00183
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9663.00183
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/1467-9663.00183?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michelle Lowe & Neil Wrigley, 2010. "The “Continuously Morphing” Retail TNC During Market Entry: Interpreting Tesco’s Expansion into the United States," Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 86(4), pages 381-408, October.
    2. Andrew Currah, 2002. "Behind the Web Store: The Organisational and Spatial Evolution of Multichannel Retailing in Toronto," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 34(8), pages 1411-1441, August.
    3. Andrew J Murphy, 2003. "(Re)Solving Space and Time: Fulfilment Issues in Online Grocery Retailing," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 35(7), pages 1173-1200, July.
    4. Brett Christophers, 2014. "Competition, Law, and the Power of (Imagined) Geography: Market Definition and the Emergence of Too-Big-to-Fail Banking in the United States," Economic Geography, Clark University, vol. 90(4), pages 429-450, October.
    5. Timothy F. Ledoux & Igor Vojnovic & June Manning Thomas & Kameshwari Pothukuchi, 2017. "Standing in the Shadows of Obesity: The Local Food Environment and Obesity in Detroit," Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG, vol. 108(5), pages 605-624, October.
    6. Neil Wrigley & Andrew Currah & Steve Wood, 2003. "Investment Bank Analysts and Knowledge in Economic Geography," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 35(3), pages 381-387, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:tvecsg:v:93:y:2002:i:1:p:62-82. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0040-747X .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.