08/01/2026
OpEd- Why Walmart Is “Cheaper” And Eastern Kentucky Paid the Price
They tell us Walmart has “always low prices.”
Most people accept that without thinking much about it. Cheaper than the store down the road must mean cheaper. That’s how competition is supposed to work. Push prices down. Reward efficiency. Force everyone to keep sharpening their pencil.
But if that were true, Walmart’s prices would keep falling.
They don’t.
Walmart’s prices don’t collapse under competition. They don’t race toward the floor. They sit comfortably in place. They rise with inflation. And every other retailer stays noticeably higher.
That tells us something important.
Walmart’s prices aren’t low. They’re protected.
The recent lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission against PepsiCo helps explain how this works. According to the FTC, Pepsi provided Walmart with promotional payments, allowances, and services that were not made available on proportionally equal terms to other retailers. Those benefits lower Walmart’s effective cost to sell. Smaller grocers and regional chains do not get the same help. Their costs stay higher.
That gap isn’t created by efficiency. It’s created by favoritism.
Once that gap exists, the illusion locks in.
Walmart’s shelf price becomes the reference point. Consumers are trained to see it as the “real” price. Every other store now looks expensive by comparison, even though their prices are closer to what a fair, functioning market would actually produce.
People don’t ask why Walmart’s price is still this high.
They ask why everyone else costs more.
That reversal is the trick.
And this is where places like Eastern Kentucky feel the damage first.
When local grocers are forced to sell the same products at structurally higher prices, customers don’t just drift away. They disappear. Stores close. Food access shrinks. Jobs vanish. What looks like a pricing strategy at the national level becomes the loss of basic infrastructure at the local level.
Those stores didn’t fail because they were inefficient. They failed because the market was tilted against them.
Walmart doesn’t need to keep pushing prices down because it doesn’t have to compete honestly. As long as suppliers widen the gap, Walmart can sit comfortably above the true floor while still looking like the cheapest option in the room.
That should bother everyone.
Free market Republicans should be angry because this replaces competition with permission. Businesses don’t win by being better. They win by being big enough to extract special treatment.
Progressives should be angry because this concentrates power, wipes out local retailers, and weakens communities while pretending to help consumers.
And none of this is legal.
The Robinson-Patman Act exists specifically to stop suppliers from doing this. It bans discriminatory promotional payments and services that advantage one retailer over another. The problem isn’t that the law is unclear. It’s that it hasn’t been enforced.
So we ended up with a market that looks competitive but isn’t. Prices that look low but aren’t. And a slogan that only works because people stopped asking the most basic question a market demands.
If these prices were really low, why aren’t they still falling?
That’s the question the system can’t survive.
Sources:
Federal Trade Commission v. PepsiCo, Inc., Complaint for Permanent Injunction, January 2025
Robinson-Patman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 13
~CA
OpEd: The preceding information does not necessarily reflect the views of Appalachia Insider as an organization.
Disclaimer: This OpEd was originally published in Feb. of 2026.
