Trust Protocol

Welcome

"There’s a saying in the Mafia," Don explains.

"If  you can’t lose big, you can’t win big.  That’s what we thrive on." Says Sue: "Whoever said winning isn’t everything wasn’t a trial lawyer."[1]

The assault on market ... prices was initiated by a San Diego attorney named Bonas.  Mr. Bonas specializes in antitrust matters; as he puts it, "Price-fixing is what I do."

     And in a case egg-ceptionally vulnerable to puns, there hae been moments of levity. Pausing during the deposition of Ms. O'Husky, Ralphs attorney Eliot Disner marveled at the first names of Mr. Bonas and his client/sister.  "Cash and Carrie.  I don't believe it," he said.  "Are there any other siblings?"  (One: Michael.)

      Despite the joking, consumer advocates say the litigation underscores a serious matter.  "The major supermarket chains are gouging consumers on the basic necessities of life," charges Harry Snyder, senior advocate at Consumers Union's West Coast regional office in San Francisco, which has released studies showing that supermarket milk prices in Los Angeles and San Francisco are far higher than those of independent grocers.

Re:  Nielsen & IRI Clearing House Services

Retail tracking services involve the continuous collection of data on the sale of consumer packaged goods (“CPG”).  From this data, retail tracking service suppliers provide reports to … customers … that estimate … market share, pricing and other information by relevant geographic region for product categories and brands being tracked.[1]

Nielsen began providing retail-tracking services in the U.S. in 1934, and expanded its operations into Europe and Canada in 1939 and 1944, respectively.  It dominated these markets for decades. [2]

Nielsen dominated the retail-tracking markets throughout North America and Europe for over 50 years through a manual, audit based retail-tracking service.  Nielsen would send field auditors to a representative sampling of stores, where they would manually count product on the shelf and review business records to estimate consumer sales over a bi-monthly period.[3]

In the late 1970’s, universal product codes (“UPC’s”) were first introduced onto product packaging in the U.S.  As retailers installed UPC scanning equipment – which not only speeded up the checkout process but also electronically recorded every consumer purchases – “a new and better method of collecting [retail-tracking] data than any that existed before” became possible.  This technology fundamentally changed the “nature of retail-tracking business, vastly increasing the amount of data available, its frequency, its cost, the manner in which it can be processed, and its value ….”  In addition to identifying sales volume, more reliably and in a timelier manner than was possible through manual audits, scanner data provided the retail-tracking supplier, and consequently its customers, to correlated purchases with prices, promotions … and other sales conditions.[4]

With the advent of scanning data, “[t]he skill that had been so important in the past and the audit staff that had been necessary to collect the data were no longer important.”  What mattered was the ability to collect and organize the vast amounts of scanner data from retailers and generate useable reports for customers.  As a result, in Nielsen’s own words “data-processing skills and software development skills … replaced data collection skills as the defining characteristic of a service.”[5]

IRI was the first company to recognize the value of scanner data, and in 1986 revolutionized the U.S. market with the introduction of “InfoScan,” the world’s first national scanner based retail-tracking service.[6]

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