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Grocer and House lawmaker says Kamala’s price controls will be ‘nail in the coffin’ for industry

August 24, 2024 | | Print Article

A Republican House lawmaker who also runs a chain of grocery stores predicted that the price controls proposed by Vice President Kamala Harris will be the “nail in the coffin” for the industry.

The Democratic Party nominee revealed herself to be exactly the communist that her critics accuse her of being when she unveiled her proposed ban on “price gouging” that would empower government goons to police the grocery industry which has been scapegoated for the gut punch of inflation inflicted on Americans by the Biden-Harris administration.

Rep. Michael Rulli (R-Ohio), whose family founded the Ohio-based chain Rulli Bros, discussed the ruination that awaits if “Comrade Kamala” gets her way.

“We’re dealing with a lot. The net profit in grocery stores is about one and a half [percent] — if you’re doing really good, one and three quarters. Just in layman’s terms, it’s about a $1.50 for every $100 that you go through the registers. And what we’ve seen in the last three to four years has been pretty horrific,” the first-term congressman told Fox News Digital, explaining that the grocery business operates on extremely low margins.

“This will be a nail in the coffin of this industry that no one can imagine,” Rulli said.

“If the Harris administration tells Procter & Gamble, which is based in Cincinnati, that this Tide right here that I’m selling today for $4.99 has to stay $4.99 for the next four years, what will happen is that Procter & Gamble will just simply choose not to make this product,” Rulli said, holding up a bottle of the laundry detergent. “And so that’s going to happen a lot.”

Rulli pointed at the product’s bar code, otherwise known as the stock keeping unit (SKU), telling the outlet that his grocery stores typically stock items with 38,000 different bar codes, with larger chains carrying more.

“Well, why would that matter to your viewers? It’s going to matter to your viewers because this is the luxury of living in the United States of America, where the average blue-collar worker, Joe Bag of Donuts, would have an opportunity to buy some nice things in life,” he told the outlet.

“What will happen in four years of a Harris administration is those 38,000 SKUs will go all the way down to 5,000 SKUs, and you will be living in Cuba or Venezuela,” said Rulli who won a June special election to replace retired Republican Rep. Bill Johnson.

He was referring to the once prosperous Latin American nation where, after the Venezuelan government imposed the type of price controls now being championed by Harris, the economy crashed and people were left scrounging for food in dumpsters and, in even more desperate cases, resorting to eating zoo animals to avoid starvation.

“Many of these smaller and independent grocery stores will go out of business. You’ve already seen it happening gradually over the last 20 or 30 years, but I would say just recently within the 80-mile circumference I’m sitting in right now, there’s been five grocery stores that have gone out of business in the last two years,” Rulli told Fox News Digital.

“This plan from Kamala Harris is insane on so many levels. To start: it is HER policies that drove up the cost of labor, gas, and electricity making grocery store owners suffer under her economic thumb,” Rulli wrote on X last week. “Now she wants Congress to implement communism to cover for her failures.”

Chris Donaldson
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