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Department Stores On Sale: An Antitrust Quandary, Mark D. Bauer

Mark D Bauer

In 2005, Macy’s bought its largest competitor, May Department Stores, for $17 billion. The resulting combination created a department store behemoth with over one thousand stores across the United States. Despite protests by the attorneys general of a number of states, and consumers and advocacy groups around the country, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) blessed this merger without requiring any modification in its terms. And according to law and economics scholars, this merger had no substantive impact on consumers, competition or consumer welfare.

My empirical research, published in an earlier law review article, showed that Macy’s now charges consumers 13% …