Price-Fixing: Why America Pays 50 Percent More for Chicken

The $29 billion poultry industry has been accused of hatching a plan to limit production.

Bloomberg
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What do you call it when would-be competitors embark on a unified strategy to limit supply, drive up prices and bilk customers of their hard-earned cash? An antitrust conspiracy, of course. But what do you call it when producers of chickens, a staple of the American diet (Wall Street even has a chicken wing index), allegedly go so far as killing their birds early, shipping more eggs and buying one another’s products to keep public supply low?

According to food distributors suing the industry, it’s called “capacity discipline.”

The $29 billion industry that churns out 90 percent of America’s chickens has engaged in a price-fixing scheme for years, according to the first of a half-dozen lawsuits filed in Chicago federal court this month. And that artificial premium has been passed on to consumers: You’ve been paying 50 percent more for that supermarket rotisserie bird, the lawsuits claim. While producers have been accused of rigging the market before, this litigation may be the largest effort yet to bring such practices to light.

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