In the space of 13 days starting Wednesday, the Connecticut legislature will open its 2025 season and a U.S. president will take office after promising to lower food and energy prices. President-elect Donald Trump has already backed away from his bold vow to slash grocery bills, a centerpiece of his campaign. But lawmakers in Hartford, prodded by state Attorney General William Tong, are expected to take a stab at the issue in at least two bills.
The measures, still taking shape, would have limited effect at the cash registers. Still, they might be worth trying if they can navigate past a few sticky issues.
One likely bill is a repeat of a plan Tong has put forward at least twice since the pandemic, strengthening Connecticut’s price-gouging law. It would tighten the definition of “price-gouging” and, in its main event, it would allow Tong’s office to investigate not just retailers but also companies up the supply chain including manufacturers, packagers and distributors.
The second bill would go after “shrinkflation,” that annoying trend — useful for those of us trying to lose weight — in which grocery purveyors sell us packages with less product for the same or even higher prices.
Tong’s office declined to give details of its shrinkflation bill, which it hinted at last week in a year-end report. But according to the state’s most prominent lobbyist for the grocery industry, no other state has adopted a shrinkflation law.
That doesn’t mean Wayne Pesce, president of the Connecticut Food Association, will oppose Tong’s push. It depends what it says. Obviously, Tong isn’t going to pitch a law that tells companies how many peanuts and peppermints they can put in a package. And legislators would not pass such a plan if he pushed it.
Nor will the bill likely limit changes in packaging. I for one am glad yogurt comes in 5.3-ounce containers, down from 8 ounces in my youth.
“I think it’s going to be some type of labeling transparency,” Pesce speculated as we talked about it late Tuesday, the night before the start of the legislative session.
We of course already have most grocery items labeled by the package price and the price per pound, or ounce. Could Tong suggest labels announcing anytime a product shrinks it package size? One worry, Pesce said, is that manufacturers could be forced to label goods for Connecticut separately, which could raise cost.
We will just have to wait and see. For now, it’s clear that customers are pushing back, buying more house brands and punishing whole categories such as salty snacks, which could help our collective health.
The bill tightening up Connecticut’s price-gouging law, which applies to all sorts of products, would not, for now, change one fundamental reality: The law applies only in times of emergency or during a disaster.
A state emergency lasted more than two years during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, when accusations of price-gouging were rampant.
“Price gouging at the retail level has been illegal in our state since 1986. Unfortunately, certain select bad actors will take advantage in a crisis, like the pandemic, and charge amounts they would never be able to obtain under normal circumstances,” Tong told the legislature’s Judiciary Committee as it considered that year’s version of the bill in 2022. “The current law presumes that the only bad actors are retailers. In fact, the opposite is true.”
The measure made it through the state House in 2021 but never came to a vote in the Senate. In 2022, it stalled in the Judiciary Committee amid opposition from folks in the energy industry. In 2023, it was removed from a larger consumer bill.
In 2024, similar language was part of a bill proposed by Sen. Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, the Senate majority leader. Again, it did not pass.
You get the idea. These proposals have significant opposition for two reasons. The first is philosophical, largely from Republicans who tend to oppose meddling in markets.
The second is practical: In an era of global transactions with real-time pricing and complex supply chains — think airline fares, gasoline prices and hotel rates — regulating anything related to how much we consumers pay can be a logistical nightmare.
As one fuel oil dealer testifying against the gouging bill said in 2022, who’s going to say what is price gouging when suppliers change prices as often as three times a day?
The bill would only give Tong the right to investigate up the supply chain. Pesce, the food association president, isn’t against that idea, depending on the exact language.
“Any retailer or any seller of any good that takes advantage of consumers during times of hardship deserves whatever penalty is on the books,” he told me. “When we’re on the wrong side of consumers, we’re on the wrong side of an issue.”
As recently as last spring, Tong took action on complaints of price-gouging by grocery retailers, after a Federal Trade Commission report accused some national stores — most not operating in Connecticut — of unfair pricing. Lawmakers were still seeing dramatic price hikes, which, Duff said to me this week, “wasn’t just inflation.”
The attorney general demanded and received pricing information from grocers across the state. Since he took no public action, we can assume what he found was kosher, or at least, not the fault of retailers, just as he said in 2022.
“There was a lot of smoke and not a lot of fire in terms of that investigation,” Pesce, whose association represents companies throughout the supply chain, said.
“We support common sense legislation around price gouging, around shrinkflation.” But he added, “I don’t believe they have the bandwidth to really get to the crux of the problem.”
By that he means energy prices, labor shortages and transportation costs. That’s the problem with any government effort to control prices. It’s either ineffective window dressing or it dives into the impossibly swirling waters of the economy, where laws can have all sorts of unintended consequences and where megatrends, not meddling move, are what matter.
It’s a noble debate and it might lead to new ideas that work. Still, it’s a lot easier for the government to raise fees than to lower market prices.
Original article found at Stamford Advocate.
