Biden Tried to Kill Costco-Style Discounts. Trump Is Stopping It.
Did you know the Biden administration worked overtime in its final days to try to stop you from buying things in bulk at the prices you love? It pushed aggressive lawsuits that threatened to make volume discounts — the precise reason Costco, Walmart, and similar stores can offer everyday low prices on all your household needs —much harder to come byNow, thanks to actions ramping up this week, President Trump's Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson is positioned to shut down this nonsense once and for all.
In the chaotic closing stretch of the Biden-Harris FTC, Chair Lina Khan — who went on to become the co-chair of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral transition team — absurdly began turning bulk pricing discounts into a legal fight.
Why? Because she seemingly hates capitalism that much.
Trump's team is certainly not afraid to put pressure on big corporate monopolistic actors when they harm consumers (the same companies that I have been very critical of in my own op-eds and legal analyses).
But Khan seemed to want to punish businesses in the free enterprise system all the time — even when they are popular with consumers and provide them benefits —for the "sin" of being too successful.
One of the things her so-called "antitrust enforcement activities" demonstrated that she really didn't like was how big companies can get products to consumers on the cheap. Which is a shame, because everyone else in the country likes that.
She loved using a little-known Great Depression law, called the Robinson-Patman Act, to crack down on companies that offered bulk pricing discounts to their customers.
For example, in December 2024, Khan's agency sued Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits, an alcohol distributor, for giving better deals to national chains like Costco, Total Wine, and Kroger while charging independent liquor stores more for the same products.
Then, on January 17, 2025 — just days before President Trump's inauguration — her FTC filed a similar suit against PepsiCo over promotional terms that she claimed favored Walmart and other giants over smaller grocers.
These companies weren't raising prices; they were lowering them. But they still got sued by Biden's administration through the Robinson-Patman Act.
Robinson-Patman wasn't written to stop companies from competing on price. That, after all, is the entire point of free enterprise. The act was written to stop companies with real market power from rigging prices with the intention of squeezing out competitors unfairly.
Yet neither of these two Biden administration Robinson-Patman Act cases pointed to a single direct harm consumers faced from this price-cutting.
At the time, then-Commissioner Ferguson called this egregious Biden abuse of power out for what it was. In his January 2025 dissent on the PepsiCo case, he labeled the filing "purely political," accusing the outgoing Democratic majority of "march[ing] staff into court with no evidence to support the most important allegations in the Complaint." He called it an "insult to the Commission's credibility, its hardworking and talented staff," and "a waste of taxpayer dollars."
Ferguson was right on target — and when he took the FTC's reins from Khan once Trump was sworn into office, he dismissed the PepsiCo case.
Now the Southern Glazer case — which has heated up this week thanks to a Monday motion filed in federal court — looks to be next.
Ferguson has already taken a two-by-four to this clear case of Biden overreach.
In his December 2024 dissent from the Khan FTC decision, Ferguson wrote that Southern Glazer "appears likely to succeed on a cost-justification defense." He pointed out that bulk orders to centralized warehouses cost the business far less per bottle than frequent small drops to individual independent stores, so it's only logical to charge them less.
Here's the kicker: The Robinson-Patman Act, which the Biden team cited as the basis of its case, explicitly allows for these cost-based pricing differences. And why shouldn't it? If the courts ruled them illegal, it would wipe out the very bargains that make Costco runs worthwhile for everyday Americans.
My wife would never forgive them, that's for sure.
Commissioner Melissa Holyoak drove this point home in her 83-page Biden dissent: "Not only does the Complaint fail to identify harm to competition or consumers, the proposed remedy would likely impede price competition and harm consumers."
"Consumers may purchase spirits from large retail chains rather than small liquor stores because of lower prices," Ferguson added, "But they may also do it because of some other feature of the favored retailers' business—for example, the convenience of buying alcohol alongside other household goods and groceries."
My family certainly agrees with this sentiment, and I'm sure yours does, too.
Which raises the question: How could the Biden team be so tone-deaf in filing these cases?Perhaps they have never done their own grocery shopping and thus didn't understand how we all shop or what we prioritize.
Or — and I fear this might be more likely — perhaps they know exactly what we all do, but they didn't take that into consideration when filing the cases, because shaping the world to more closely resemble their progressive, anti-capitalist worldview was more important to them than protecting consumer welfare.
Maybe the Biden holdovers tried to take away your Costco deals because they truly hate capitalist business efficiency that much. But Chair Ferguson and the rest of the Trump administration are making sure they won't succeed.
If that's not grounds for a free lifetime Costco membership, then I don't know what is.
John Pierce is the founder of the National Constitutional Law Union (NCLU). He has represented many high-profile clients, including Tulsi Gabbard and Rudy Giuliani, and his writing has been shared on Truth Social by President Donald J. Trump.
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